New Release: PhotoQt 1.0

Published: 11th of August, 2013

It has been a long time. It has been more than half a year since version 1.0. But therefore this version now brings more changes, bug fixes and more feature requests than any other version before.
Although v1.0 is nothing but the natural sequel to v0.9, it does feel like a big step to finally have a version number starting with a '1' instead of a '0'. Photo(Qt) has been stable for quite a few versions, though it has never been running as smoothly as it does now I believe.
I also don't want to forget to thank all of the translators that have put a lot of work in translating many, many new strings for this release: Lukas Dobransky (Slovakian), Mathieu Marache & Olivier Devineau (French), Manuel Gutierrez (Spanish), Yuriy Tkach (Russian), Daniel Korbel (Polish).
It's a lot of work for a person on its own to translate everything into another language. If you want to help to improve some translation, help complete one or maybe even start with a new language, head over to Transifex.

Note: On first start, PhotoQt will move all your settings/etc. from '~/.photo' to '~/.photoqt'. In all my tests I didn't encounter any problems, however, a backup certainly wont harm.

Here's a little overview over the main changes. For a simple list with a few more things than those here check the changelog.

Name Change

Of course th most obvious change is the name change. 'Photo' is no more, now we're talking 'PhotoQt'. Why this change? Well, it's a little more unique in this combi and it makes the app easier discoverable. See the 'About' section for a few more words on that (well, it's just saying the exact same again, but uses a few more words).
Along with the name change came the need for a new logo. I hope you all like it!

Supported File Types

PhotoQt makes use of GraphicsMagick to support many image formats. Currently more than 80 different ones are supported in PhotoQt. This part could still do with some improvements, but so far it's working quite well. There are still some formats that I'd like to support, but that don't work just yet. But I'm working on it!

Faster Start-up

Photo always was a little slow to start up. I put a lot of work into that for this release. Now PhotoQt starts up more than 7 times faster than Photo did in version 0.9.*.
How this is possible? Well, PhotoQt only creates those widgets that are needed. E.g. the settings window isn't always needed, in fact most of the times it's not needed. So there's no need to set it up when you start PhotoQt, but only when you request it to open.

Smart and Dynamic Thumbnails

Up until v0.9.1, whenever you opened an image, Photo would load the thumbnails in the background, starting with the first image. Now PhotoQt starts loading the thumbnails with the currently visible ones. And per default it stops as soon as it reaches the end of the visible area (this can be disabled if desired).

Image Context Menu (and Drop Down Menu)

The function for manipulating an image has been moved from the dropdown menu into the rightclick context menu of the main image. That also keeps the dropdown menu nice and simple.

Set-as-Wallpaper function

Now you can set an image right from PhotoQt as desktop wallpaper. Supported window managers: Gnome/Unity, XFCE4, 'Other' (like e.g. Openbox, PhotoQt uses feh or nitrogen). Currently not supported: KDE4, Razor-Qt - they both unfortunately don't offer an API to change the wallpaper (yet).

... and a lot more. You can read of a few more things in the changelog. However, over such a long time, there have been so many smaller changes - you simply have to run it and see for yourself.

Enjoy :-)