Loading your plugins dynamically

We will now deal with the application loading these plugins:

1. Create a new Subproject inside ch08-image-animation.

2. Select the type Qt Widgets Application.

3. Name it image-animation and accept the default Class Information settings.

We have a few last things to do in the .pro files. First, image-animation will try to load the plugins from somewhere in its output directory. Because each filter plugin project is independent, its output directory is separated from image-animation. Thus, each time you modify a plugin, you will have to copy yourself the compiled shared library inside the proper image-animation directory. This works to make it available to the image-animation application, but we are lazy developers, right?

We can automate this by updating plugins-common-pri like so:

INCLUDEPATH += $$PWD/sdk 
DEPENDPATH += $$PWD/sdk 
 
windows { 
    CONFIG(debug, debug|release) { 
        target_install_path = $$OUT_PWD/../image-animation/debug/plugins/ 
    } else { 
 ...