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Overview

Two releases in one calendar year?! It’s a holiday miracle!

Yes, PhotoDemon 2024.12 is now available to download. Highlights of this release include HEIF/HEIC image support and customizable keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys).

Like all previous PhotoDemon releases, version 2024.12 runs on any Windows PC sold in the past 20 years. All modern versions of Windows (XP through the latest Windows 11 insider builds) are fully supported.

Download the new release

If you already have a copy of PhotoDemon, you’re good to go! PhotoDemon will automatically update according to the preference in your Tools > Options > Updates menu.

If you want to manually download a fresh copy, click here or visit the download page.

Special thanks

This release exists thanks to many wonderful contributors who donated time, money, and feedback to the project.

If you find PhotoDemon useful, please consider making a small donation. Your support makes this 100% free, 100% open-source project possible.

Thank you especially to all of PhotoDemon’s Patreon supporters. Thank you also to everyone who makes a one-time donation.

Finally, thank you to everyone who contributed translations, bug reports, ideas, and feedback to this release. I am grateful to all of you. ❤

What’s new and improved in this release

Customizable hotkeys

I’ll be honest - I don’t modify keyboard shortcuts in any of my daily software.

So I’ve been consistently surprised to receive so many requests for customizable hotkeys in PhotoDemon. Apparently many of you create your own hotkey collections across all the software you use? I’m impressed! (And horrified!)

I have long dreaded adding this feature to PhotoDemon. PhotoDemon has hundreds of different tools, adjustments, and effects - and custom hotkeys need to integrate cleanly with every single one of them. Also, any time you let users customize core app features, it opens a Pandora’s Box of new ways to break things.

Despite these fears, I finally relented and tackled this feature. After several months of dedicated work, you can finally edit PhotoDemon’s hotkeys to your liking.

Start by clicking the new Tools > Keyboard shortcuts menu:

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This brings up a dialog that displays all of PhotoDemon’s (many) features:

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The main box at the top is a treeview control. You can expand individual items (nodes) to see additional hotkey targets. Everything is organized identically to PhotoDemon’s main menu system.

Items in bold can be assigned hotkeys. Items that are not bold are just organizational - typically, these are parent categories that simply collect a bunch of related features together.

Scroll down to the very bottom of the tree to edit hotkeys for non-menu features, like toolbox tools:

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Click on an item and it will open up a text box. Type any valid key combination and PhotoDemon will automatically catch it and assign that combination as your new hotkey.

Hopefully this works for you, but one of the most frustrating things I encountered when working on this feature was that auto-detecting certain hotkey combinations simply doesn’t work. On my development PC, I eventually tracked down the culprit: other software, which can “steal” various hotkeys before they reach PhotoDemon. (AMD and Nvidia’s system apps were particularly aggressive about this.) A search online showed that many apps do this, including a huge list of apps that come installed on various PC brands - apps that most users rarely, if ever, directly interact with.

To provide a workaround for this problem, I’ve also added the ability to manually choose hotkeys by selecting them from a dropdown list:

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The list of available keys is generated by your system, and all key names are pulled from your system keyboard driver. Because there is endless variety in keyboard layouts, this should enable you to use any physical keys provided by your keyboard, as long as the keyboard manufacturer supplies a valid name to the Windows system libraries that handle key events. (PhotoDemon relies on those Windows libraries for generating all keys and keys names).

Once a hotkey is associated with PhotoDemon, it should take precedence in handling the hotkey over other software on your PC (while PhotoDemon is running and actively has focus, at least). If for some reason you cannot get a specific hotkey combination to work, you will need to figure out which software is stealing that hotkey and turn it off. (Or, just use a different key combo for PhotoDemon - this was often the easier choice for me!)

Your saved hotkey collection can be saved to or loaded from a standalone file. You can also use the “generate summary” button to produce a webpage (HTML) of your full hotkey collection, including any changes you’ve made:

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A cute aspect of this feature is that your current PhotoDemon interface color is used as the HTML accent color. Fun!

This finally solves the long-standing question of “where can I find all of PhotoDemon’s hotkeys?” I’m sorry it took me this long to document it!

If you decide you don’t like any of the hotkey changes you’ve made, you can always reset everything to its default state, or just undo changes you’ve made this session via the on-screen buttons.

Finally, let me mention one more feature of this tool. (This is where I attempt to address the afore-mentioned “Pandora’s box of ways to break things”!)

If you attempt to assign the same hotkey to multiple features, PhotoDemon will detect it and warn you. Hover the problematic command and a tooltip will pop up, describing which commands conflict:

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This should make it easy to resolve any duplicate hotkeys that may occur.

Save and load HEIC/HEIF images

The “High Efficiency Image Format”, or “HEIF”, has been the default image format on Apple devices since 2017. Android devices added support in 2019, and since then, many digital camera manufacturers have also added HEIF support.

PhotoDemon added support for HEIF/HEIC some years back, but this relied on Microsoft Windows’s official HEIF library. Microsoft - a company worth more than $3 trillion USD as of this writing - didn’t want to participate in the HEIF patent consortium, so rather than add HEIF support to Windows, they actually require you to go to the Microsoft Store and manually buy a $0.99 USD HEIF add-on. (This presumably covers any patent licensing fees, plus a little extra for some executive’s sixth or seventh yacht.)

Needless to say, very few users do this.

So in this release, I finally bit the bullet and natively integrated HEIF/HEIC support directly into PhotoDemon, c/o the open-source libheif library. Many thank-yous to the libheif authors for their great work.

With this, HEIF/HEIC images can now be loaded and saved with PhotoDemon, even if you don’t buy the “official” Microsoft add-on. PD is also unique in offering support for multi-frame HEIF/HEIC images. This works automatically when importing HEIF images, and when exporting HEIFs, a multi-frame toggle appears when the source image contains multiple layers:

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(Note that multi-frame support is primarily intended for frames with identical sizes, so be careful using this for other types of layered images - HEIF is not a replacement for traditional layered image formats!)

Both lossy and lossless encoding modes are supported. I hope this feature simplifies the process of editing various phone and camera photos with PhotoDemon.

Many updates to localization files and features

Like every new PhotoDemon release, language files have seen numerous updates and improvements thanks to many generous volunteers. Thank you so much to everyone who contributes to PhotoDemon’s extensive localization support!

Notably, this is also the first PhotoDemon release to ship with support for the following languages:

Latvian, by Mariozo.
Russian, by vosska.

Thank you these authors for their contributions, and an extra big thank-you to everyone who continues to offer localization services with each new PhotoDemon release.

Additional upgrades and improvements.

Those are some of the biggest improvements available in PhotoDemon 2024.12, but alongside the usual bug-fixes and performance enhancements, a few other new features snuck in.

Other highlights of this release include:

Other

For an exhaustive list of changes and bug-fixes, review the project’s commit log.

In conclusion

Thank you for using PhotoDemon.

I am so grateful to everyone who contributes to each release, whether through donations, Patreon, GitHub, or by sending old-fashioned emails. A full list of contributors is available on the Contributors page, or in the Help > About menu of PhotoDemon itself. PhotoDemon’s ever-expanding community is full of amazing individuals, and they are the reason I can give this program away for free.

If you find PhotoDemon useful, please consider making a small one-time donation or joining our Patreon family. I’d love to add you to the next contributor list.

I hope you enjoy this release, and I will be back early next year with the next one. (Spoiler: I’ve already started work on an on-canvas crop tool!)

Until then, I hope you have a great rest of 2024. Happy holidays!