PhotoQt v2.0

Published: 16th of December, 2020

It has been a little while since the last release but it is finally here: the all new version 2.0 of PhotoQt!

With this release, the version number jumps from 1.7.1 directly to 2.0. The main reason for this jump is because some major changes have happened in PhotoQt. First of all, PhotoQt has been completely rewritten based on a more recent version of QtQuick. The thus available additional features take care of some difficulties I had in the past that led to some hacky workarounds. None of them are anymore necessary leading to better performance, reliability, and fewer bugs. This also means that the minimum required version for PhotoQt is now bumped up to 5.9.

The interface has been refreshed and updated. One of the more prominant new features it he ability to pop out any of the elements, like the main menu, the settings manager, or the histogram. You can pick and choose which ones you want to see incorporated into the main menu (as in previous versions) or shown in their own window.

Viewing images is now also a bit different than before. There is a new image engine for displaying the main image more reliably. Besides being more reliable, the new engine also allows for more image transitions. In addition to opacity images can now be slid in/out along the x or y axis. And resting the mouse cursor on the main image will hide the cursor after a short timeout until it is moved again.

The list of supported image formats has slightly grown to also include video formats. The list of supported video formats is dependent on your system and what codecs you have installed. Thus by default all video formats are disabled, you need to explicitely enable which ones you want to use in the settings. Another newly supported image format is AVIF (might require additional installation of respective plugin).

Thumbnails are now created more efficiently as multiple thumbnails are loaded in parallel. In the settings you can choose how many thread you want PhotoQt to use to create them. Also, thumbnails for RAW images are now loaded from their meta data (if one is available), speeding up loading times for their thumbnails dramatically.

These are just some of the major changes, there have been many other changes as well, both large and small. Why not try it out and see for yourself?

A big Thank You to everybody who has contributed some of their time to report bugs, give feedback, and help translating PhotoQt into another language!

If you also want to help, there are two ways you can do so:

PhotoQt has been translated in a few languages, but many are incomplete and do not have a currently active translator. If you know a language other than English and want to help simply head over to the Crowdin project.
If you are comfortable deploying Qt applications with a bunch of dependencies on Windows and are willing to take on packing PhotoQt for Windows, please get in touch. Since I'm not actively using Windows, this has always been a bit of a struggle for me.

I hope you like the new version of PhotoQt. If you encounter any issues, please let me know either by email or through GitLab. I also appreciate any feedback or suggestions as to what to change/improve/add.

Enjoy PhotoQt,

Lukas