QPixmap Class

Detailed Description

Qt provides four classes for handling image data: QImage, QPixmap, QBitmap and QPicture. QImage is designed and optimized for I/O, and for direct pixel access and manipulation, while QPixmap is designed and optimized for showing images on screen. QBitmap is only a convenience class that inherits QPixmap, ensuring a depth of 1. The isQBitmap() function returns true if a QPixmap object is really a bitmap, otherwise returns false. Finally, the QPicture class is a paint device that records and replays QPainter commands.

A QPixmap can easily be displayed on the screen using QLabel or one of QAbstractButton's subclasses (such as QPushButton and QToolButton). QLabel has a pixmap property, whereas QAbstractButton has an icon property.

QPixmap objects can be passed around by value since the QPixmap class uses implicit data sharing. For more information, see the Implicit Data Sharing documentation. QPixmap objects can also be streamed.

Note that the pixel data in a pixmap is internal and is managed by the underlying window system. Because QPixmap is a QPaintDevice subclass, QPainter can be used to draw directly onto pixmaps. Pixels can only be accessed through QPainter functions or by converting the QPixmap to a QImage. However, the fill() function is available for initializing the entire pixmap with a given color.

There are functions to convert between QImage and QPixmap. Typically, the QImage class is used to load an image file, optionally manipulating the image data, before the QImage object is converted into a QPixmap to be shown on screen. Alternatively, if no manipulation is desired, the image file can be loaded directly into a QPixmap.

QPixmap provides a collection of functions that can be used to obtain a variety of information about the pixmap. In addition, there are several functions that enables transformation of the pixmap.

Reading and Writing Image Files

QPixmap provides several ways of reading an image file: The file can be loaded when constructing the QPixmap object, or by using the load() or loadFromData() functions later on. When loading an image, the file name can either refer to an actual file on disk or to one of the application's embedded resources. See The Qt Resource System overview for details on how to embed images and other resource files in the application's executable.

Simply call the save() function to save a QPixmap object.

The complete list of supported file formats are available through the QImageReader::supportedImageFormats() and QImageWriter::supportedImageFormats() functions. New file formats can be added as plugins. By default, Qt supports the following formats:

Pixmap Information

QPixmap provides a collection of functions that can be used to obtain a variety of information about the pixmap:

Pixmap Conversion

A QPixmap object can be converted into a QImage using the toImage() function. Likewise, a QImage can be converted into a QPixmap using the fromImage(). If this is too expensive an operation, you can use QBitmap::fromImage() instead.

To convert a QPixmap to and from HICON you can use the QtWinExtras functions QtWin::toHICON() and QtWin::fromHICON() respectively.

Pixmap Transformations

QPixmap supports a number of functions for creating a new pixmap that is a transformed version of the original:

The scaled(), scaledToWidth() and scaledToHeight() functions return scaled copies of the pixmap, while the copy() function creates a QPixmap that is a plain copy of the original one.

The transformed() function returns a copy of the pixmap that is transformed with the given transformation matrix and transformation mode: Internally, the transformation matrix is adjusted to compensate for unwanted translation, i.e. transformed() returns the smallest pixmap containing all transformed points of the original pixmap. The static trueMatrix() function returns the actual matrix used for transforming the pixmap.