PhotoQt v1.3

Published: 26th of July, 2015

PhotoQt v1.2.1 marked the end of an era for PhotoQt: It was the last release based on QWidgets. Over the past few months I ported PhotoQt over to QML. This demanded a complete re-structuring and to a large extent a re-write of the entire code! It was a lot of work, and I was a little skeptical at first if it really was a good idea to do that, but I'm glad I did.

QML might not be appropriate for every app, but for PhotoQt it definitely is: PhotoQt's interface is heavily customised, and includes many animations and (obviously) images that have to be displayed in the right position and scaling. It was very tedious to do that with the old code, and it unfortunately contained a good share of bugs (as everybody who used any of the older versions will know). QML makes it very easy to produce the customised interface I need for PhotoQt. Backed by C++ functions to do some of the more demanding code and to do some of the things that are not (yet) possible in QML, it really is a very powerfull tool!

As I was carefully re-writing PhotoQt, I knew pretty well what I wanted to end up with. Hence, I was able to avoid numerous (potential) bugs right from the start. The result: A smooth, as-bug-free-as-possible image viewer, with an even more polished and consistent interface.

Well, yes, I admit it, I'm very, very excited about v1.3... I put a lot of work into it, since I started the port I added on average somewhere around 80 code lines a day! So, yes, I'm very pleased to see it finally 'completed' (well, it's never really completed, but you get what I mean).

A full list of changes wouldn't make much sense, as every single part of PhotoQt was changed. However, there are two things, two settings you might be looking for, that are not there anymore:

1) Limit the number of images to be preloaded.
It used to be possible to tell PhotoQt to only preload (i.e., create an empty thumbnail) a maximum number of files in a folder and only set up more if actually needed. This speeded up loading of a folder tremendously. However, PhotoQt handles folders/files/thumbnails completely different now, much more efficient than before. In my test, loading a folder with more than 13,000 files was read and loaded almost instantly. So there didn't seem to be a need to implement this feature again (it would have been a lot of work for no benefit in performance).

2) Writing image resolution on thumbnail
This feature is unfortunately currently unavailable. The way PhotoQt now loads thumbnails in the backround is pretty much disconnected from the way it could receive information about the image (like the resolution). I spent quite some time trying to include this feature, but I haven't figured out an efficient way to get around the mentioned limitation yet. Hopefully it will be back for v1.4, but for now it unfortunately wont be available.

Important Note for UBUNTU (plus derivatives) users
PhotoQt used to be available in a PPA (together with a lot of other cool software). However, this PPA has been discontinued by its owner and is no longer available. You will have to install PhotoQt using the linked package at the download page for the moment.

Thank you for using PhotoQt, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do :-)

Lukas