[HN Gopher] Qimgv - Fast, simple image viewer
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Qimgv - Fast, simple image viewer
        
       Author : Mr_Minderbinder
       Score  : 98 points
       Date   : 2024-06-03 05:37 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | hawski wrote:
       | It is one of the image viewers I use on Linux. It supports most
       | formats I stumble upon nowadays and it is pretty fast and does
       | mostly what I want. I had some minor issues with it, but it is
       | mostly not worth bickering about them as it may come down to my
       | personal preferences.
       | 
       | I have been using Linux for around 20 years, but I still miss
       | IrfanView the most. It was very fast even on those machines with
       | RAM in MBs and CPU frequencies in MHz. The array of formats it
       | supports is staggering, but I loved the most all those easy to
       | use and fast basic image manipulation - rotate, crop, resize,
       | color channel reorder (i.e. BGR to RGB) and much more.
       | 
       | I know that I can run it through Wine, but it feels wrong for me
       | (not the most rational, I know).
        
         | Beijinger wrote:
         | FYI: apt install qimgv works.
         | 
         | Maybe you would be so kind to explain the advantages. I use
         | geeqie:
         | 
         | https://www.geeqie.org/
         | 
         | It is okay. I wish renaming would be better. The windows are
         | strange sometimes.
        
       | netbioserror wrote:
       | Love Qimgv. My literal only complaint is that it has to rasterize
       | SVGs. Other than that, it's the best image viewer I've ever used.
       | Preserves color profiles!
        
         | genpfault wrote:
         | > it has to rasterize SVGs
         | 
         | ...as opposed to streaming the vectors to an XY display[1]? :)
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
        
           | ygra wrote:
           | It renders them to a bitmap once, which is what you view,
           | then. Even when zooming in, you only get the initial bitmap
           | scaled.
        
       | kjksf wrote:
       | I like the UI optimized for power users (keyboard shortcuts).
       | 
       | But good lord, it's 130 MB of dlls on Windows.
       | 
       | A much svelter alternative (on Windows) is CactusViewer
       | (https://github.com/Wassimulator/CactusViewer), at mere 2.3 MB.
        
         | abdusco wrote:
         | I've always been a fan of Faststone Image Viewer. It's
         | similarly small and packed with features.
         | 
         | https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
        
           | seedboot wrote:
           | Faststone is really fantastic
        
           | wonger_ wrote:
           | My favorite Faststone features: drag-to-reorder (without
           | layout shift!), batch rename files, shortcut to open image in
           | other program, adjustable thumbnail sizes
        
           | yboris wrote:
           | My favorite is _FastStone MaxView_ -
           | https://www.faststone.org/FSMaxViewDetail.htm
        
         | eigenvalue wrote:
         | Or IrfanView
        
           | creshal wrote:
           | With all the plugins, IrfanView is also >30 MiB. But to its
           | credit, those plugins cover a looot of format.
        
         | mouse_ wrote:
         | > But good lord, it's 130 MB of dlls on Windows.
         | 
         | What a nightmare.
        
       | wg0 wrote:
       | If I'm not wrong, Qt draws the whole interface by itself just
       | like Flutter does?
        
         | jcelerier wrote:
         | Yes
        
       | eldog_ wrote:
       | Been using qimv instead of eog for a while now and love it, takes
       | me back to the days of picasa which was the first time I ever had
       | photos load _fast_.
        
       | _flux wrote:
       | I've been using http://guichaz.free.fr/gliv/ for a long time. I
       | guess the fast hw-accelerated zooming/rotation was the hook. This
       | one promises high-quality zooming using OpenCV, which to me
       | sounds like it would not be hardware-accelerated.
       | 
       | Though my PC is now a lot faster than it was a decade (or more?)
       | ago, so maybe it's not such a killer feature anymore. I'll this
       | this one a shot, in particular as the page for GLiv says:
       | 
       | > Note that gliv-1.9.7 is probably the last release of GLiv.
       | Other image viewers like Eye of GNOME are now sufficiently fast
       | that I don't use GLiv anymore. There will be new releases only if
       | I receive bug reports.
       | 
       | At first try it seems it's more difficult with qimgv to zoom into
       | a particular region that with GLiv :/, otherwise it seems fast
       | and fine.
        
       | tetris11 wrote:
       | I love Feh.
       | 
       | It's a terrible piece of software with the most atrocious
       | bindings known to man[0], but it is so light and speedy at what
       | it does, with minimal dependencies that I haven't had the heart
       | to switch away from it, even thought Qimgv is superior in almost
       | every single way.
       | 
       | 0: Mousewheel is bound to "next image". Yeah.
        
         | hggh wrote:
         | nsxiv (fork of the now unmaintained sxiv), is also very light
         | (under 100KB) and simple (and the mousewheel zooms in and out):
         | https://codeberg.org/nsxiv/nsxiv
        
           | cylinder714 wrote:
           | I wonder if qiv, my favorite lightweight image viewer, us
           | related somehow.
        
           | porphyra wrote:
           | Yeah I use nsxiv. It's pretty good and I like being able to
           | have custom keybindings to run arbitrary bash scripts.
        
       | Daunk wrote:
       | Okay so I've tried it and it seems fine, real simple. But it dies
       | when I load large video files (tried with 6GB videos). And it's
       | also not able to follow the order of images that is presented in
       | something like the Windows file explorer. For example, in my
       | Downloads folder, the files are sorted by when I downloaded them,
       | with other folders being sorted A to Z, but Qimvg only has a set
       | order it follows, no matter my folder option. Sadly a pass for
       | me.
        
       | arendtio wrote:
       | Does someone know how Qimgv compares to Gwenview?
       | 
       | AFAIK both are based on Qt and Gwenview makes use of KDE libs,
       | but are there any noticable differences when it comes to
       | features?
        
       | buserror wrote:
       | Wish it'd preview RAW files. We've been spoiled on Mac for 25+
       | years with GraphicConverter, and since I switched to Linux
       | desktop more or less full time, that is one of the tool I miss
       | the most.
        
         | auxym wrote:
         | nomacs can preview raw files on linux
         | 
         | https://nomacs.org/
        
       | therealmarv wrote:
       | For Mac I've settled with Phoenix Slides
       | https://blyt.net/phxslides/ (don't be afraid of the oldschool
       | website design)
       | 
       | It's open source with a long history, extremely fast, handles
       | 4K/5K monitors and color management correctly and supports also
       | trackpad gestures on Mac. It replaced Xee3 for me last year.
        
       | unnervingduck wrote:
       | I've settled with this one because it's really fast and preloads
       | images, which makes looking through thousands of time-lapse
       | photos a doable task, just holding the arrow key.I'd like a bit
       | more editing capabilities but I understand it might be out of
       | scope for a minimal image viewer.
        
       | vanderZwan wrote:
       | At my previous job a colleague at one point had the use case of
       | highly detailed scans of cell tissue where he'd like to be able
       | to both zoom out to see the structure the entire tissue, but also
       | be able to zoom in down to individual cells. The pngs were
       | gigabytes in size and he was a bit worried about the idea of
       | using lossy jpgs since they might have messed up the tiny cell
       | blotches.
       | 
       | We first tried to find some sort of map-library based solution
       | that converted the images into a set of tiles, but eventually I
       | found Viewnior which somehow seemed to be able to handle the pngs
       | relatively well compared to any of the other image viewers we
       | tried at the time (which all would choke on the giant sized
       | images)
       | 
       | https://github.com/hellosiyan/Viewnior
       | 
       | I know that that's a very niche use case, and I have no idea how
       | Qimgv compares ("fast" is not the same as "scales well with
       | really large images"), but I thought I'd share in case anyone
       | else has had to deal with this problem.
        
         | pdw wrote:
         | I've used nip2 when dealing with giant images. It's a weird
         | tool, but it's designed for that kind of work.
         | https://github.com/libvips/nip2
        
         | danjl wrote:
         | GPUs have a 8192 texture resolution limit, which often is the
         | problem for large images. For gigapixel images, you need a
         | viewer which breaks up the image into tiles for rendering.
        
       | Laesx wrote:
       | For me there's honestly nothing better than:
       | https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview
       | 
       | It's just so utterly fast (specially on opening times) I haven't
       | been able to find anything even near it.
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | For windows we have these very tiny yet super fast image viewers
       | 
       | VJPEG (168kB, single file) http://stereopsis.com/vjpeg/
       | 
       | JPEGView (~9MB, with dlls) https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview
       | 
       | JPEGView is my daily driver and can comfortably open huge
       | (hundreds of MB) images.
        
       | lupusreal wrote:
       | Maybe I'm a little crazy but I use mpv as my image viewer. I like
       | that I can use the same application for still images, video, and
       | audio. Unified keybingings, etc. It takes some scripts and
       | configuration to make this work though.
        
         | alok-g wrote:
         | Qimgv has experimental video support using libmpv.
        
       | tomaspollak wrote:
       | A few months ago I wrote a small program to view and play
       | animated GIFs, but letting you pause, skip, etc like it was a
       | video. In case anyone's interested, here it is:
       | 
       | https://github.com/tomas/pixelhopper
       | 
       | Fun fact: it doesn't use QT nor GTK for the UI, so it's as
       | lightweight as it can get!
        
       | mathfailure wrote:
       | Latest release dated 2021. This is almost abandonware.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-06-03 23:02 UTC)