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PreviewQt
PhotoQt v4.4

FAQ

This list of frequently asked questions will be updated as new questions arise. If you don't find the answer to your question here, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

General questions

PhotoQt is developed as open-source, meaning its source code is freely available to everyone and can be obtained by everyone for free. It is licensed under the GPL v2 or later, meaning that anybody can use and modify PhotoQt, as long as this license is kept (more info on the GPL v2 here). I decided to publish PhotoQt as free open-source software as I have been the happy user of numerous open-source projects myself, and this is a way I can give something back to the community.


You can find out what version you are running by executing photoqt --version on the command line, or by checking the About element when PhotoQt is running (default shortcut: i).


An overview of the configuration used for your build of PhotoQt can be obtained either by running photoqt --show-info from the command line or by clicking on the version number in the About element (default shortcut: i).


Installing PhotoQt

Depending on your system you might have different options available. There is an installer for Windows available, and PhotoQt is available in anincreasing number of distributions. You can always compile the latest version from source (instructions here). The latest development snapshot is available on GitLab.


Although Windows 7 is not officially supported by PhotoQt (or by Qt6 for that matter), some have had success running the latest version of PhotoQt using the VxKex Windows 7 API Extensions. For questions and support of VxKex please refer to its git repository.

Please note that Windows 7 has reached its end of life in early 2020 and does not receive any more security updates. It is highly recommended to upgrade to a newer operating system.


Using PhotoQt

PhotoQt uses a variety of image libraries to render and show all kinds of images. The exact selection of supported image formats depends on which library has been enabled when your build of PhotoQt was done, and also on the versions of said libraries themselves. If you are missing some image formats in your build check that your running the latest version of PhotoQt and inform the maintainer who compiled your build of PhotoQt. If you built it yourself, make sure that all desired image libraries are enabled and found when running cmake.


Faces can be tagged in a variety of different image formats, all formats that have write support for IPTC tags by Exiv2. In order to start the face tagging mode in PhotoQt load any image, open the context menu (by default this is done by right clicking), and select Tag faces. There is also a shortcut action available to start the face tagging mode, the default key shortcut set for this is Ctrl+F. To exit the face tagging mode you can press Escape on your key board or byyou can click on the exit button shown in the top left corner of the window.

The actual tagging is done by click-and-drag a rectangle around a face, following which you will be prompted to enter the name. Existing tags can be removed by clicking on them.