PhotoQt 5.3

Published: 11th of May, 2026

Almost three months have passed, time for another update of PhotoQt with many improvements, bug fixes, and a few additions. One major focus of this release (and also the next one) is improving the overall performance of the various parts of PhotoQt, starting with the image plugins.

Here are some of the highlights of this release:

Performance improvements: Work has been done on all of the various image plugins to improve their performance and reliability. This should lead to the viewing of photos to feel even more snappy than before. For the next release, other parts of the code will also be scrutinized for potential performance improvements, so we're not done here yet!
Photo Spheres: PhotoQt has been able to show photo spheres for a while now, and up until now it did so by diretcly interfacing with OpenGL. Starting with this release, PhotoQt now relies solely on existing QML types to present photo spheres, making the code agnostic to which graphics backend is used and resulting in significantly better performance.
Rate my files: It is now possible to give a star ratings to the files inside PhotoQt. The star rating will be stored in different ways (file metadata, extended file attributes, Windows property store) to help it integrate into what you are already working with.
Extensions updates: Besides a new extension - Thumbnail Generator for pre-generating thumbnails of any folder and its subfolders - PhotoQt now also by default verifies the shared library file to ensure no unexpected code can be easily injected. Note that this adds some extra (easy) steps for distributing the extensions (see here for more details). If this cannot be done, it is possible to explicitly exclude the library files from verification when configuring PhotoQt.

Besides these changes, there have been a whole range of other smaller additions and improvements:

Natural sorting was broken on systems with certain locales. = Better interpolation handling including more user controls.
It is possible to manually enter a specific zoom level.
When zooming an image, the zoom 'snaps in' at full size (100%) and default size.
For generating video thumbnails, PhotoQt can directly call the ffmpegthumbnailer API (opt-in at compile time).
When switching images, the thumbnails will no longer force-hide.
Rotating/Mirroring an image was sometimes slightly buggy, but is once again working as expected.
The direction of the slider for setting the animation speed when setting up a slider was reversed.
Disabling all animations globally now also disables zoom animation.

Even this list does not list everything that has changed with this release. You can find a more comprehensive list of what 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 either through Wise or PayPal

Enjoy PhotoQt,

Lukas

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