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Published: 13th of May, 2024
Another all new release is ready: PhotoQt v4.5. This release brings a few new additions, but mostly focuses on bug fixes, improvements, and generally a more polished user experience. Thank you to all who gave feedback and suggestions!
Here is an overview of some of the major updates in this new release:
Various improvements and fixes were added to PhotoQt to make it start up and load folders much faster. On startup, the main image is shown not only without animation, but is also fully loaded before any thumbnails are. In addition, loading a folder with a large number of images (tens of thousands and more) is now done much more efficiently with the time until the image is shown reduced by more than one order of magnitude. The more images there are in a folder, the larger the relative performance gains.
The slideshow feature has undergone a major overhaul for this release. It is now possible to select more than one music files for background music (including shuffling there order), all file types (including videos) are now handled properly, no 'busy loading photo' indicator will be shown during slideshows, and the left and right arrow keys can be used to switch to the next/previous image. Probably the biggest addition to the slideshow feature, however, has been the addition of the Ken Burns effect. The Ken Burns effect slowly pans across and zooms images to give the appearance of action in the still images. This effect, however, is not applied to video files, they will continue to be shown normally.
Photo spheres are now much better integrated into the main interface, they now behave much like regular images. By default, PhotoQt will load such an image immediately as sphere, although this behavior can be disabled in the settings. This change in handling of photo spheres allows the use of some of the other features (showing location on map, histogram, etc.) to also be used for photo spheres. Note, however, that custom color profiles are currently not supported for color profiles.
Various smaller improvements were done to the file dialog. Zooming the files is now happening much smoother than before, the subfolder menus in the breadcrumbs now cache all subfolders instead of reloading them every time they are requested, the backspace key is now used for going back in history instead of moving a file to trash, and the suggestions for subfolders when editing the location text have been improved.
Support for color profiles was further improved, including some important fixes. Images that claim to be of format ARGB32 no longer result in a fully transparent image once a color profile has been applied. Using LittleCMS to apply external or embedded color profiles is now happening in the proper "direction", meaning that the colors now finally will be displayed exactly as intended. Applying color profiles using Qt's support for this feature already worked as expected.
These are just some of the major changes and additions, there also have been a whole bunch of other improvements and various bug fixes – particularly many fixes and improvements for this release compared to most if not all older releases. This leads to an overall much more polished user experience that I'm sure everybody will appreciate. You can find a more complete list of everything that has changed in this release in the Changelog.
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:
If you want to help PhotoQt, there are a few ways you can get involved:
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