What’s new in PhotoQt 1.7.1:
- Animated images would not load: This bug was due to a mistake in the function that takes care of the percentage encoding of filenames, it did not handle paths starting with ‘file://’ properly
- The more images in a directory the slower PhotoQt would load first image: When loading an image in a directory with thousands of pictures, this delay was not just noticeable, it was just plain annoying. And while PhotoQt was busy loading the images, its interface remained unresponsive. PhotoQt is now much smarter in reusing information about files to display images again very quickly (more or less immediately).
- Deleting an image would lead to infinite ‘loading’ indicator: To see this bug, simply delete any image and move two images in either direction. This was caused by a property binding that got broken during the deletion process.
- List of releases in appdata file was in reverse order: This bug is not really visible and did not affect the usability of PhotoQt in any way. Nonetheless, it was there and it was not right.
PhotoQt is a totally free, multiplatform and open source desktop application designed from the offset to act as a highly configurable, flexible and extremely fast/responsive image viewer software that boasts a modern and uncluttered graphical user interface implemented in Qt5.
Features at a glance
Key features include support of a wide variety of image file formats supported by the GraphicsMagick software, support for viewing EXIF information of images, slideshow functionality, the ability to set a photo as desktop background (wallpaper), image thumbnail cache, as well as support for flipping, rotating and zooming photos with no permanent changes.
In addition, users will be able to scale images permanently, to rename, copy, move or delete image files from their file system, or to navigate between images using the mouse and keyboard peripheral devices. It integrates with the system tray area of your desktop environment, supports various command-line options, it can be configured to look and act the way you want it to, and it’s translated in several languages.
Getting started with PhotoQt
For your convenience, the application is distributed as pre-built binary package for several distributions of Linux, including Arch Linux, Chakra, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, ROSA, Slackware and Ubuntu, as well as for the Microsoft Windows operating system.
A source tarball is also available for download on the project’s website (see link below), allowing users to optimize the software for a specific hardware architecture or operating system. Supported hardware platforms include 32-bit and 64-bit.
After installation, you can run the application from the main menu of your desktop environment/window manager. When it opens, you will be prompted by a dialog that displays detailed information about the application’s main functions. Closing the tips dialog will ask you to open a single image file or an entire folder that contains images.
