PhotoQt v3.3 - shortcuts, maps, and more

Published: 15th of June, 2023

It has only been about a month, but there have been some major improvements and additions to PhotoQt since, including an all-new shortcuts engine, interactive map views for images with location data, overall visual improvements, and many other changes. Shoutout to @hadoukez, @flashwalker, @s7stem7, and @a17r for their feedback and help.

Highlights of this release

Here are some of the biggest highlights of this release:

All new shortcuts engine
One of the strength of PhotoQt is the wide availability and integration of all kinds of shortcuts. With this release, a new (and better) way to manage shortcuts has been introduced.
Shortcuts are managed in groups. Within a group, multiple shortcuts (gestures/key combinations) and multiple actions (right column) can be defined. All gestures/key combinations can activate the same actions. If multiple actions are defined then there are two ways this can be handled:
1. All actions can be executed at the same time whenever one of the shortcuts is activated.
2. the actions are executed one at a time and every time a shortcut is activated it moves on to the next one in the list. There is an optional timeout after which the cycle gets reset to the beginning.
Some other changed related to the shortcuts include:
- The mouse wheel can be used (as before) for shortcuts, or optionally to move the image around (can be convenient for touchpads)
- There are new shortcut actions to move the image in any direction or navigate to any of its edges
- The left/right mouse wheel can now be used as part of shortcuts
Explore images in an interactive map
Sometimes images come with location information attached to them. There are two things PhotoQt can do with that location information:
1. The location of the current image (if it has one) can be shown in a small floating map next to the main image.
2. All images in the current folder that have location data can be shown on an interactive map.
There are multiple map providers that are currently supported:
- OpenStreetMap (default)
- Google Maps (requires additional google-maps plugin and API token)
- MapBox (requires API key)
- Esri (requires Access token)
You can switch between these providers in the settings manager from the 'Image View' tab.
Interface improvements
There have been various improvements to the interface overall. The most noticable change is likely the cleaner and more unified look of all the different elements. With the use of templates, all elements have their title and action buttons in the same place. They also behave better when popped out and/or scaled to small sizes.

These are just some of the highlights, there have been a lot more things that made it into this new release, e.g., the support of QtPDF, preventing potential race conditions, and much more. You can find a more complete list in the Changelog.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of this new release to help you visualize some of the changes listed above:

Looking ahead: Qt 6

Currently PhotoQt is based on Qt 5. The next version of Qt has been out for a few years already by now, and is supported (to some extent) by an increasing amount of distributions. Switching PhotoQt from Qt 5 to Qt 6 is not something that will happen overnight, but I started thinking about how this might happen. It would, however, allow PhotoQt to take advantage of some more recent additions and improvements in Qt and prepare it for the future.

Switching to Qt6 does, however, come with some caveats. It excludes people on distributions that do not ship Qt 6 (e.g., Ubuntu 20.04) from receiving newer updates. In some cases this can be solved by making use of projects that have backported Qt 6 to older systems.

As of right now, I expect some movement in that area later this year. Whether that will mean that there will be a Qt 5 and Qt 6 version in parallel for some time or not, that remains to be seen. If you have some comments or suggestions regarding this, please let me know.

Get involved

I love to hear from people using PhotoQt. In order to get in touch with me for feedback/support/etc., there are a few different ways you can do so:

Email: You can always send me an email: (you need to enable javascript to see the email address)
IRC: I often hang out in the IRC channel #photoqt over at Libera.Chat.
GitLab: Feel free to open an issue over in the GitLab repository.

If you want to help PhotoQt, there are a few ways you can get involved:

Join the translation team over on Crowdin. If your language is missing you can simply request it directly on Crowdin or send me an email and I can add it to the project.
Give feedback of what you like/don't like, or what you think is missing from PhotoQt. To give feedback, send me an email or open an issue on GitLab.

If you are considering supporting PhotoQt by donation, please consider donating to the humanitarian relief in Ukraine instead, for example to the Ukrainian Red Cross.

Enjoy PhotoQt,

Lukas