Second (and final) beta version of v5.0 available
Published: 17th of December, 2025
The second (and final) beta release of the upcoming v5.0 is ready for testing. Thank you to all those that tested the first beta and provided feedback. If you are able to help with testing, please do and report any issues you encounter.
There have been a whole slew of fixes and improvements since the first beta release. If no major issues are found, this puts PhotoQt v5.0 on track to be released before Christmas.
A (non-exhaustive) summary of changes since the first beta release include:
- All command line flags are now respected also at startup of PhotoQt.
- All colors in PhotoQt, no matter which interface, are now properly set while taking its context properly into account. This also fixes the look of the integrated interface with the dark mode of Windows.
- Archives, documents, and comic books can now be browsed again as before, both through the integrated navigation as well as through the viewer mode.
- Various styling issues have been fixed.
- Adjusting the scroll speed is now once again respected by the settings manager.
- Scrolling the thumbnail bar with the active thumbnail kept in center works again as expected.
- Some message boxes would be shown behind the main window with not always a way to bring them to the foreground. These are now all explicitly shown on top of all windows.
- Hiding entries in context menus resulted in lots of empty space on some platforms, this is handled properly now.
- The imgur.com extension has been updated to work more reliably and on all platforms.
- Some sections in the settings manager had no reset button, and some reset buttons were not properly hidden when their section was hidden.
- Dropping a file or folder on PhotoQt now has an effect: Dropping it in the main view will load the file/folder, dropping it in the file dialog will navigate to and display that folder.
- The Alt and Shift modifiers are now detected and reported at all times.
- Extensions are now identified by an id hash that also incorporates the path of the extension.
- The previous slider/spinbox combo has been reworked to be more compact and more reliable.
- The threshold for disabling interpolation has been replaced by the window size.
- The text width in the settings manager is capped at a maximum width to improve readability of the text.
If you want to take part in testing the upcoming release, there are a few different ways you are able to download and install PhotoQt v5.0-beta2:
If you come across any bugs while testing this second beta, please let me know, preferably by open up issues on GitLab. If all goes well and no major issues are found, then the final release of v5.0 is aimed for early next week, before Christmas. Keep an eye out on the News section of the PhotoQt website to find out more details. At this point more details will be given as to what changed with this new major release, and some other exciting upcoming developments.
There is one other way you can help with PhotoQt: Many of its translations need help! If you have some time to help with translating PhotoQt, please head over to the Crowdin project page.
Enjoy PhotoQt,
Lukas Spies
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