What fast image viewers are available for Ubuntu?
What is the fastest / most responsive image viewer? I’m looking for a program that is responsive and opens large .jpg s fast — progressively and/or by cleverly loading only parts it will render. A 6 MB picture has a resolution of 4000×3000, while my eeePC only has 1024×600, so I won’t see a lot of the pixels anyway. Another technique is to cache pictures in the background while I’m viewing the first. A lot of programs on Windows do stuff like that, is there anything you can recommend for an eeePC running Ubuntu? Context: I recently switched to XFCE to revive my eeePC (as Gnome Shell and Unity are somewhat slow on it). I’m generally satisfied as it runs pretty snappy, and I can get work done on the go. However, I’d like to organize some fotos that I have, and all the image viewers I tried are too slow. For example, Ristretto, XFCE’s lean image viewer, takes about a second to open a picture of 1.8 MB (5 seconds for a 6 MB picture), and freezes in that time.
People that can add tags: Maybe you should consider a low-end tag for questions about running Ubuntu on low-end or older hardware? (Alternatively we could have a tag concerning lean and fast setups of Ubuntu.)
I’m not having problems with the loading time of the applications, but rather with the loading time of the images. Eye of Gnome, Shotwell, Ristretto, GPicView, all load fast enough and their interface works fine. I can even run Digikam, which has a long startup time but once loaded is OK. I’m looking mainly for something that lets me switch quickly between large images, not necessarily for a minimal GUI.
I see what you mean, though in my answer I do mention that you can flick between very high resolution images in slideshow mode with feh much quicker than gthumb , etc. Loading of the images is the focus in my answer below; ignore the comment I made above about loading times of the programs.
There is a rather small number of actually different free jpeg decoder implementations out there. I’m guessing that most image viewers use the standard libjpeg6 library, which is included by default by pretty much all Linux distributions and was last updated back in 1998. That code is just the JPEG group’s free reference code. Viewers that embed their own decoder probably also just use something based on the reference implementation. So, speed differences will be based on how efficiently the app handles the pixels after they come out of decoder and if they do pre-fetching.
6 Answers 6
GPicView
I’ll recommend to you this Simple and Fast image viewer.
As you say that you computer is not a super fast calculator you should look for software with a few functions (the fewest possible), and this software meets this requirement, see the next screen-shoot and you will notice it.
You can install it through the Software-Center.
I mean: does it load the next image in the slideshow into RAM, before actually displaying it? This makes displaying the next image instantaneous (at least when you’ve spent a couple of seconds viewing the current image).
Just installed it and it is exactly what I was looking for. Now I am able to quickly open images from the command line! thanks
There is no reason for software with «few functions (the fewest possible)» to be fast. That is a luddite point of view.
@Lucio Using more memory is usually a good way to gain speed. For example, pre-caching images. Your views are outdated. Are you working on a Pentium MMX?
For sheer speed, feh is the most responsive image viewer you’ll ever come across; it might take a bit of getting used to as it is managed from the command line. However, you can add various feh commands as custom actions to filemanagers such as Nautilus and Thunar so that you can activate feh via the context menu when browsing your files.
On the man page it is noted that:
Feh is a mode-based image viewer. It is especially aimed at commandline users who need a fast image viewer without huge GUI dependencies, though it can also be started by (graphical) file managers to view an image. It supports filelists, various image sorting modes, image captions and more. Configurable keyboard shortcuts are used to control it.
Some examples of usage:
Feh operates in various modes such as slideshow, montage, index, and thumbnail, although you can of course view pictures individually, and also save the results of the index or thumbnail viewing to file.
All the following examples assume you use terminal to cd to the folder containing the pictures first:
1) To start a fullscreen slideshow, and for it to display all the loadable pictures in the folder with a 3 second gap and then exit, you could run:
You can use your mouse scrollwheel to flick back and forth through the pictures while the slideshow is running. Even with high resolution pictures (5-6 mb each), you can flick through the pictures incredibly quickly.
You could also add this command, with slight modification, as a ‘custom’ action, context menu item in a file manager such as Thunar ( feh -F -D 3 —cycle-once %F ): see my answer here regarding Thunar custom actions.
Note: when not running in fullscreen mode ( -F ), you may need to supply the —scale-down command switch so the pictures fill your desktop, but not display at their actual size (which could be 4000×3000 and would not fit the screen).
Hence your custom ‘open-with’ command/launcher should use this —scale-down option, for the times you want to view individual pictures.
2) In the case of creating an index print and saving to file you could use the following command:
3) You can also use the thumbnail option ( -t ), which is like the previous command, but allows you to click the thumbnails from the created file:
feh -t --preload --scale-down -o thumbprint.png You can do a lot more with feh and there are many more options to experiment with, so for more information, please see man feh and the Ubuntu manpages online.
Просмотрщики
Просмотрщики графических файлов (фотографий, изображений, картинок) для Linux. Браузеры изображений для Linux.
Koko
Koko — простой просмотрщик изображений. Обладает минимальным функционалом. Разрабатывается в рамках проекта KDE.
Viewnior
qView
qView — простой, минималистичный просмотрщик изображений. Не имеет панелей управления и других интерфейсных элементов. Доступ к функциям осуществляется через контекстное меню или с использованием горячих клавиш.
Eye Of Gnome
Eye Of Gnome (eog) — простой просмотрщик изображений, разрабатываемый в рамках среды рабочего стола GNOME.
Nomacs
Nomacs — просмотрщик изображений с возможностями обработки фото. Поддерживает все популярные форматы файлов изображений, включая RAW и PSD. Имеет настраиваемы интерфейс.
Gwenview
Ristretto
XnViewMP
XnViewMP (XnView Multi Platform) — мощный просмотрщик изображений для Linux. Программа может выполнять функции менеджера фотографий (каталогизатора) и конвертера. Позволяет выполнять редактирование изображений, поддерживается экспорт в различные форматы. Поддерживает более 500 графических форматов файлов.
Geeqie
Geeqie — просмотрщик изображений для Linux. Поддерживает большое число форматов. позволяет просматривать изображения в RAW формате.
PhotoQt
Photo — стильный и легкий просмотрщик графических файлов для Linux. Главное отличие программы от аналогичных это ее внешний вид. Программа не имеет рамку окна и занимает весь рабочий стол, снизу же отображаются миниатюры изображений из директории.
GPicView
GPicView — простая программа для просмотра изображений в Linux. GPicView обладает самым минимумом функций для просмотра изображений (пролистывание, масштабирование, полноэкранный просмотр), а также может поворачивать изображение на 90 градусов. Программа работает очень быстро и занимает мало места в оперативной памяти.