Hi All - I’m new to Shotcut so any suggestions are welcome. I imported a bunch of stills and wish to play them rapidly for animation. The first half dozen frames run fine, but then the program skips several frames, plays one and skips several frames again until the end. I’ve changed Interpolation from nearest neighbor to bilinear but haven’t found much on line that helps with stop motion animation issues. Thanks!
Export it, play in your regular media player then come back and tell us if playback is still choppy.
Smooth playback while editing is not always possible in video editors because editing is hardware dependent.
EDIT: Also you really need to tell which version of Shotcut you are using and which operating system you are running.
We can’t guess these things 
If your stills are stored as a folder with hundreds/thousands of PNG or JPEG image files, then I would expect choppy playback when editing. It is just to time-consuming for Shotcut to open, read and decompress each file to do it in real time. The reason the first few frames play smoothly is that Shotcut opens and caches the first few files in memory. So it will slow down after those cached frames have been played.
My advice would be to use Shotcut to open the files, and then immediately export as a lossless/intermediate format (DNxHD, ProRes, FFV1, etc). Then, open the intermediate file into a new Shotcut project and edit that. You should see much better editing performance.