7 ms·

Qimgv – Fast, simple image viewer

hawski 2y ago
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 2y ago
  FYI: apt install qimgv works. Maybe you would be so kind to explain the advantages. I use geeqie: https://www.geeqie.org/ https://www.geeqie.org/ It is okay. I wish renaming would be better. The windows are strange sometimes.
netbioserror 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > it has to rasterize SVGs ...as opposed to streaming the vectors to an XY display[1]? :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
  - ygra 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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 https://github.com/Wassimulator/CactusViewer), at mere 2.3 MB.
- abdusco 2y ago
  I've always been a fan of Faststone Image Viewer. It's similarly small and packed with features. https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
  - wonger_ 2y ago
    My favorite Faststone features: drag-to-reorder (without layout shift!), batch rename files, shortcut to open image in other program, adjustable thumbnail sizes
  - seedboot 2y ago
    Faststone is really fantastic
  - yboris 2y ago
    My favorite is FastStone MaxView - https://www.faststone.org/FSMaxViewDetail.htm https://www.faststone.org/FSMaxViewDetail.htm
- eigenvalue 2y ago
  Or IrfanView
  - creshal 2y ago
    With all the plugins, IrfanView is also >30 MiB. But to its credit, those plugins cover a looot of format.
- mouse_ 2y ago
  > But good lord, it's 130 MB of dlls on Windows. What a nightmare.
wg0 2y ago
If I'm not wrong, Qt draws the whole interface by itself just like Flutter does?
- jcelerier 2y ago
  Yes
eldog_ 2y ago
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 2y ago
I've been using http://guichaz.free.fr/gliv/ 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 https://codeberg.org/nsxiv/nsxiv
  - cylinder714 2y ago
    I wonder if qiv, my favorite lightweight image viewer, us related somehow.
  - porphyra 2y ago
    Yeah I use nsxiv. It's pretty good and I like being able to have custom keybindings to run arbitrary bash scripts.
Daunk 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  nomacs can preview raw files on linux https://nomacs.org/ https://nomacs.org/
- pedrovhb 2y ago
  It does view RAW when compiled with the right flags. JXL too, interestingly. Managed to save a bunch of space on old photos (converting with cjxl, but which I wouldn't have done if I weren't able to see them somehow).
therealmarv 2y ago
For Mac I've settled with Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/ 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  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 https://github.com/libvips/nip2
- danjl 2y ago
  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.
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    Yeah that makes sense. I find it a bit odd that this isn't something you can easily search for though.
  - shotnothing 2y ago
    [dead]
- shotnothing 2y ago
  [dead]
Laesx 2y ago
For me there's honestly nothing better than: https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview 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 2y ago
For windows we have these very tiny yet super fast image viewers VJPEG (168kB, single file) http://stereopsis.com/vjpeg/ http://stereopsis.com/vjpeg/ JPEGView (~9MB, with dlls) https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview JPEGView is my daily driver and can comfortably open huge (hundreds of MB) images.
lupusreal 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Qimgv has experimental video support using libmpv.
tomaspollak 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
Latest release dated 2021. This is almost abandonware.
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
Linux just doesn't have proper image viewers, except for QIMGV, which kicks ass. It reminded me of the very early Acdsee (3.x?) image viewer. It's fast, reliable and doesn't hinder your work. The absolute best. Sad thing is, there are a lot of smaller issues piled up, bc the author doesn't have time to maintain it bc of the ukr vs rus war. I'm thinking about getting to know c++, to maintain this project, until the og dev comes back...
walteweiss 2y ago
Donated a few bucks to the Ukrainian army, so to increase chances of the author to continue working on this wonderful app.

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 2y ago
FYI: apt install qimgv works. Maybe you would be so kind to explain the advantages. I use geeqie: https://www.geeqie.org/ https://www.geeqie.org/ It is okay. I wish renaming would be better. The windows are strange sometimes.

netbioserror 2y ago

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 2y ago
> it has to rasterize SVGs ...as opposed to streaming the vectors to an XY display[1]? :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor
- ygra 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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 https://github.com/Wassimulator/CactusViewer), at mere 2.3 MB.

abdusco 2y ago
I've always been a fan of Faststone Image Viewer. It's similarly small and packed with features. https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
- wonger_ 2y ago
  My favorite Faststone features: drag-to-reorder (without layout shift!), batch rename files, shortcut to open image in other program, adjustable thumbnail sizes
- seedboot 2y ago
  Faststone is really fantastic
- yboris 2y ago
  My favorite is FastStone MaxView - https://www.faststone.org/FSMaxViewDetail.htm https://www.faststone.org/FSMaxViewDetail.htm
eigenvalue 2y ago
Or IrfanView
- creshal 2y ago
  With all the plugins, IrfanView is also >30 MiB. But to its credit, those plugins cover a looot of format.
mouse_ 2y ago
> But good lord, it's 130 MB of dlls on Windows. What a nightmare.

wg0 2y ago

If I'm not wrong, Qt draws the whole interface by itself just like Flutter does?

jcelerier 2y ago
Yes

eldog_ 2y ago

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 2y ago

I've been using http://guichaz.free.fr/gliv/ 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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 https://codeberg.org/nsxiv/nsxiv
- cylinder714 2y ago
  I wonder if qiv, my favorite lightweight image viewer, us related somehow.
- porphyra 2y ago
  Yeah I use nsxiv. It's pretty good and I like being able to have custom keybindings to run arbitrary bash scripts.

Daunk 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
nomacs can preview raw files on linux https://nomacs.org/ https://nomacs.org/
pedrovhb 2y ago
It does view RAW when compiled with the right flags. JXL too, interestingly. Managed to save a bunch of space on old photos (converting with cjxl, but which I wouldn't have done if I weren't able to see them somehow).

therealmarv 2y ago

For Mac I've settled with Phoenix Slides https://blyt.net/phxslides/ 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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 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 2y ago
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 https://github.com/libvips/nip2
danjl 2y ago
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.
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  Yeah that makes sense. I find it a bit odd that this isn't something you can easily search for though.
- shotnothing 2y ago
  [dead]
shotnothing 2y ago
[dead]

Laesx 2y ago

For me there's honestly nothing better than: https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview 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 2y ago

For windows we have these very tiny yet super fast image viewers VJPEG (168kB, single file) http://stereopsis.com/vjpeg/ http://stereopsis.com/vjpeg/ JPEGView (~9MB, with dlls) https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview JPEGView is my daily driver and can comfortably open huge (hundreds of MB) images.

lupusreal 2y ago

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 2y ago
Qimgv has experimental video support using libmpv.

tomaspollak 2y ago

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 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 2y ago

Latest release dated 2021. This is almost abandonware.

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

Linux just doesn't have proper image viewers, except for QIMGV, which kicks ass. It reminded me of the very early Acdsee (3.x?) image viewer. It's fast, reliable and doesn't hinder your work. The absolute best. Sad thing is, there are a lot of smaller issues piled up, bc the author doesn't have time to maintain it bc of the ukr vs rus war. I'm thinking about getting to know c++, to maintain this project, until the og dev comes back...

walteweiss 2y ago

Donated a few bucks to the Ukrainian army, so to increase chances of the author to continue working on this wonderful app.