How to create a resizable Qt thumbnail preview? - c++

Question

I'm working on a basic image viewer/tagger that will need a thumbnail view to select an image. So far, I've used a QDockWidget enclosing a QScrollArea with a QHBoxLayout to contain a series of QLabels, each of which has its QPixMap set.
This seems very inelegant, and it only gets uglier to consider how I might implement auto-scaling of the thumbnails when the QDockWidget is resized. It's further complicated by the additional need to resize the thumbnails when the scroll bar appears and disappears.
There must be a better way to do this?

Answer 1

I've ran into a similar problem when trying to animate resizing a qlabel with a qpixmap. The method I found that worked best was to use a QWidget instead and re-implement the paintEvent function. Then your QWidget image will automatically be scaled if it's resized. Here is an example:
In my case I had the private variables in a private object called private_:
bool image_set_;
QImage image_;
QBrush paintbrush_;
void MyClass::paintEvent( QPaintEvent* event )
{
// if the QWidget has an image set, then we use our custom painting.
if( this->private_->image_set_ )
{
//I've made it so that my QWidget has a 1px white border
this->private_->paintbrush_.setTextureImage( this->private_->image_.scaled(QSize( this->width() - 2, this->height() - 2 ) ) );
QPainter painter( this );
QRect temp_rect = QRect( 1, 1, this->width()-2, this->height() - 2 );
painter.fillRect( this->rect(), Qt::white );
painter.fillRect( temp_rect, this->private_->paintbrush_ );
}
else
{
QWidget::paintEvent( event );
}
}