I would be inclined to not use QFileDialog for that task -- it's designed to look and function the way users expect a file selection dialog to work, which includes navigation. I have a similar use-case in a program I'm currently working on, and my solution was to create a very simple custom dialog that simply presents a list of the files they are allowed to select from. It's very easy to get that list from a QDir and drop that QStringList into a QListWidget.