diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index acb2093..c10b84c 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ Date (Timezone)              | Version | Comment
 03/03/2022 06:49:31 PM (PST) | 0.5.2   | Predicting the next most requested method: ExifToolHelper now has a set_tags() method similar to the get_tags() method.  This was pulled from ExifToolAlpha, combining the old set_tags/set_tags_batch into one method.<br>Added a new constructor/property to ExifToolHelper: check_execute, which (by default) will raise ExifToolExecuteError when the exit status code from exiftool subprocess is non-zero.  This should help users debug otherwise silent errors.<br>Also updated more docstrings and added maintenance script to generate docs.
 03/26/2022 06:48:01 AM (PDT) | 0.5.3   | Quite a few docstring changes<br>ExifToolHelper's get_tags() and set_tags() checks tag names to prevent inadvertent write behavior<br>Renamed a few of the errors to make sure the errors are explicit<br>ExifToolHelper() has some static helper methods which can be used when extending the class (ExifToolAlpha.set_keywords_batch() demonstrates a sample usage).<br>setup.py tweaked to make it Beta rather than Alpha<br>ExifToolAlpha.get_tag() updated to make it more robust.<br>Fixed ujson compatibility<br>Cleaned up and refactored testing.
 08/27/2022 06:06:32 PM (PDT) | 0.5.4   | New Feature: added raw_bytes parameter to ExifTool.execute() to return bytes only with no decoding conversion.<br>Changed: ExifTool.execute() now accepts both [str,bytes].  When given str, it will encode according to the ExifTool.encoding property.<br>Changed: ExifToolHelper.execute() now accepts Any type, and will do a str() on any non-str parameter.<br>Technical change: Popen() no longer uses an -encoding parameter, therefore working with the socket is back to bytes when interfacing with the exiftool subprocess.  This should be invisible to most users as the default behavior will still be the same.<br>Tests: Created associated test with a custom makernotes example to write and read back bytes.<br>Docs: Updated documentation with comprehensive samples, and a better FAQ section for common problems.
+12/30/2022 02:35:18 PM (PST) | 0.5.5   | No functional changes, only a huge speed improvement with large operations :: Update: Speed up large responses from exiftool.  Instead of using + string concatenation, uses list appends and reverse(), which results in a speedup of 10x+ for large operations.  See more details from the [reported issue](https://github.com/sylikc/pyexiftool/issues/60) and [PR 61](https://github.com/sylikc/pyexiftool/pull/61) by [prutschman](https://github.com/prutschman)
 
 
 Follow maintenance/release-process.html when releasing a version.
diff --git a/exiftool/__init__.py b/exiftool/__init__.py
index 97916fb..b5ef557 100644
--- a/exiftool/__init__.py
+++ b/exiftool/__init__.py
@@ -61,7 +61,7 @@
 
 # version number using Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 https://semver.org/
 # may not be PEP-440 compliant https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0440/#semantic-versioning
-__version__ = "0.5.4"
+__version__ = "0.5.5"
 
 
 # while we COULD import all the exceptions into the base library namespace,