PhotoQt 5.2

Published: 20th of February, 2026

It's time for another release, version 5.2! All the changes that have been added to PhotoQt this past month focussed on improving existing features and fixing a few bugs, with a few nice additions nonetheless along for the ride.

Some of the highlights of this release include:

Large Archive handling: When loading large archives (multiple GB of size), PhotoQt no longer freezes up, but instead remains responsive and gives some basic feedback. At the same time the speed at which archives are loaded has been improved drastically, allowing PhotoQt to load archives with hundreds of thousands of image files in as little as mere seconds. Depending on the compression and structure, this can take a little longer though, so new controls have been added to ignore archives over a certain file size and/or limit PhotoQt to only load a subset of the files in an archive.
File dialog: The speed of the fie dialog has been improved by better handling of which file view is currently visible. This avoids unnecessary (and potentially expensive) image size checks, resulting in much smoother handling all around. In addition, folder thumbnails can now be given any desired sorting, including following the sorting criteria of the main view. Another improvement in this area is that mouse events (like the right click for the context menu) is now also captures in the empty area where there are no files.
Wayland: The code for handling screen factors on Wayland has been improved to reliably read out the proper screen scale factor of the current screen and not only the primary screen. This now also supports setups with multiple screens with all different scale factors.
Interpolation: In order to present any image without any artifacts from scaling a large image down, PhotoQt now (with a delay) loads a properly scaled version of the image once zooming has been finished. This avoids having to rely on (potentially expensive) interpolation handling in real-time and minimizes the risk of missing any corner cases.

Some other smaller changes include:

Making PhotoQt compatible with ZXing-C++ 3.x.
Removing support for FreeImage as it appears to be abandoned and has an increasing list of unpatched vulnerabilities.
Fix scrolling to the current thumbnail when PhotoQt is started with an image passed on
Apply any orientation stored in Exif metadata exactly once.
Fix setting/previewing accent colors in the settings manager.
When a filter yields no matches, show notification and keep Filter window open.
Fix setting the interval when setting up a slideshow.

You can also find a list of everything that has changed with this release in the Changelog.

Get involved

I love to hear from people using PhotoQt. In order to get in touch with me for feedback/support/etc., the best way to do so is by opening an issue over in the GitLab repository: https://gitlab.com/lspies/photoqt

If this is not an option for you, then you can also always send me an email: (you need to enable javascript to see the email address)

Another way to help PhotoQt is to join the translation team over on Crowdin. If your language is missing you can simply request it directly on Crowdin or send me an email ((you need to enable javascript to see the email address)) and I can add it to the project.

If you are considering supporting PhotoQt by donation, please consider donating to the humanitarian relief in Ukraine instead, for example to the Ukrainian Red Cross. Otherwise, you can donate directly to PhotoQt through PayPal.

Enjoy PhotoQt,

Lukas

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