PhotoQt v1.5 released!

Published: 11th of January, 2017

It's here: A brand-new release of PhotoQt, version 1.5. This release brings once again many exciting changes! Some of the highlights of this release include:

Improved shortcuts handling. Not only do the traditional shortcuts work more reliably, PhotoQt now supports any custom mouse gesture as shortcut. And if a touchscreen is available, you can set any touch gesture as shortcut, too! You can use any gesture you like, there are no limitations...
PhotoQt can now show a histogram of the currently viewed image. When enabled, the histogram is shown in a floating rectangle that can be resied and moved as desired. There are two versions available: 1) greyscale histogram, combining all colors into a greyscale value, 2) color histogram showing three curves, one for each of red, green and blue.
PhotoQt can now be told to re-open the last loaded image at startup. This is disabled by default, but can be enabled in the first tab of the settings element. PhotoQt will ignore this setting only if an image path has been passed on to it. I.e., if you open an image with PhotoQt, that image will be loaded as expected and not the previously loaded one.
The bar with the thumbnails has been re-worked (once again). Starting with this release PhotoQt now lets Qt/QML handle most of the thumbnails loading. In the past, this was done manually, resembling to some degree all that was necessary back in the time of a pure Qt/QWidgets PhotoQt. It just took a little while to really move beyond this mindset and surrender some control over the thumbnails over to Qt/QML. The code is much cleaner now, and the thumbnails feel as if they even offer slightly better performance than before (though that might just be wishful thinking). In any case, they're performance has at least not suffered, they still load very efficiently!

Of course these are only the four biggest highlights in this release. There have many many more additions and changes. A few more are listed in the Changelog, or to get a full overview of what has happened, check out the commit messages of the Git repository (they are typically pretty descriptive).

Also, once again many small and not so small bugs have been fixed along the way, far too many to name all of them. Suffice to say that PhotoQt has never worked as reliable and has never shown as good performance as with v1.5. Given that it always has been pretty fast, this is very exciting!

If you happen to find any bug or anything that is not working (hopefully everything works just fine), please let me know and I'll make sure to fix it for the next release!

Over the next couple of days I will also progressively update the various other packages and Windows builds... If they're not yet done by the time you check, simply come back a little later and it should be updated!

Enjoy PhotoQt :-)