4 ms·

KDE's new Photos app offers a sleek alternative to Gwenview

20 points by fork-bomber 26d ago

burnoutdv 26d ago
That is interesting for me because Gwenview comes to an grinding halt when cycling through raw files, or rather the ones I got, olympus raw files (.orf), maybe other more mainstream formats dont have that problem. When sorting photos I fell back to XnView MP but that crashes on me if I am to fast so its not optimal either. Lets see if the new kid can perform here
- torginus 26d ago
  I don't get how an app like this makes a difference. Isn't an image viewer just reading from disk, using whatever image decoding library that's standard, and copying to screen? Of course you can get any of the above arbitrarily wrong, but supposing you don't, you have performance baseline. You can get cute and prefetch a few images or maybe downsample them and store the thumbnails somewhere, but that's something users might be unhappy about. I don't know, can you handroll a jpeg implementation that can beat libjpeg? Personally the image viewer I'm happiest with has been Quick Look in macOS, largely down to performance.
  - jraph 26d ago
    > I don't get how an app like this makes a difference. Isn't an image viewer just reading from disk, using whatever image decoding library that's standard, and copying to screen? Memory leaks could happen anywhere in the process. Allocate a surface for the bog standard decoder to draw on, forget to release the surface, boom you have a leak. It possibly doesn't help that raw files are likely to be especially heavy. burnoutdv should report a bug if not done already.
  - throw-the-towel 26d ago
    I don't know why, but for my needs everything except Viewnior is slow as hell.
feverzsj 26d ago
That's some really ... general name.
- hurricanepootis 26d ago
  The actual app and binary is called koko, but shows up as "Photos" cause it's named that in the desktop file.
- neilalexander 26d ago
  Naming should be general. Ask a new user whether names like Dolphin, Okular, Kdenlive, Kate, Gwenview and Dragon are even remotely discoverable. KDE application naming is so consistently terrible that their default application launcher has to subtitle them with descriptions.
  - account42 26d ago
    No it really shouldn't. Try finding help with a problem with you're having with "photos". In an open source operating system you shouldn't have marketing people trying to compete for what is the one and only photo viewer or file browser so you need actual names to tell them apart. > KDE application naming is so consistently terrible that their default application launcher has to subtitle them with descriptions. So they are discoverable after all and that is a problem how?
    - neilalexander 26d ago
      It's not about fighting over the "one and only", it's about sane human-friendly defaults. A desktop environment can and should express opinions over those defaults, because they are what make or break the experience for a new or novice user. If a power user wants to swap things out, rename/disambiguate them or whatever then ultimately nothing stops them. The subtitles are a user interface bandaid that has to exist because the naming is bad. With discoverable naming, the bandaid would not be needed. When you keep compounding bandaids, user experience breaks down.
    - varun_ch 26d ago
kdjdjdjfjsjd 26d ago
A decently looking KDE application? I’m proper amazed. (And I’m not even joking).
- kdjdjdjfjsjd 26d ago
  This was meant complimentarily, mind you. KDE apps more often than not tend to land on the “so full of options with conflicting text hierarchy, icons and weird spacing rules” that opening a KDE app sometimes feels like a risking complete sensory assault. It’s truly refreshing to see a good, competent UI that doesn’t feel like the devs just gave up and made every variable a button with some insane icon. Kudos KDE Photos team.
  - Melonai 25d ago
    Absolutely agree here, and this is the main reason why I'm stuck on GNOME (despite not being perfectly happy with it), and why I find it interesting how many people on the internet and here especially love using KDE so much! Don't get me wrong, the KDE project is great, and the design language has notably improved over the recent years, but I just can't get myself to use it! The constant design inconsistencies genuinely bother me, and badly! I find myself struggling to concentrate on work because I just end up staring at some uncentered object, or some misaligning lines, and I gave the whole environment multiple tries over the years. GNOME, despite it's inconfigurability and crazed decision making, genuinely figured out a strong design language across the board of all software under the project, and they enforce it heavily. I do wish I could enjoy using KDE one day though, maybe I should give it another try.
akimbostrawman 26d ago
Things that are missing for me: - keyboard shortcut configuration for basic controls such as next/previous image - always show all meta/exif data
account42 26d ago
Gwenview is already the sleek image viewer alternative compared to fully-featured programs. > But development on Gwenview has slowed Good, it doesn't need constant changes.
Oxodao 26d ago
eye-of-gnome was nearly perfect. But the "modernization" (e.g. GTK4 and some small ux changes) made me un-usable for me. I settled on eye-of-mate but there's still a few things I'd rather change (e.g. with zoomed-in pictures you can't use left/right arrow to go to the next one in the folder because now it move the viewport of the zoomed picture). It's really unfortunate that those UX changes are not behind flags (I would have no issue with those being turned on by default which I could revert back easily) EDIT/ But to be fair its more related at everything related to GTK4 for me, All the GTK3-era app were amazing, now I can't stand any of them and it pretty much made me switch to QT equivalent for most of them

20 points by fork-bomber 26d ago

That is interesting for me because Gwenview comes to an grinding halt when cycling through raw files, or rather the ones I got, olympus raw files (.orf), maybe other more mainstream formats dont have that problem. When sorting photos I fell back to XnView MP but that crashes on me if I am to fast so its not optimal either. Lets see if the new kid can perform here

torginus 26d ago
I don't get how an app like this makes a difference. Isn't an image viewer just reading from disk, using whatever image decoding library that's standard, and copying to screen? Of course you can get any of the above arbitrarily wrong, but supposing you don't, you have performance baseline. You can get cute and prefetch a few images or maybe downsample them and store the thumbnails somewhere, but that's something users might be unhappy about. I don't know, can you handroll a jpeg implementation that can beat libjpeg? Personally the image viewer I'm happiest with has been Quick Look in macOS, largely down to performance.
- jraph 26d ago
  > I don't get how an app like this makes a difference. Isn't an image viewer just reading from disk, using whatever image decoding library that's standard, and copying to screen? Memory leaks could happen anywhere in the process. Allocate a surface for the bog standard decoder to draw on, forget to release the surface, boom you have a leak. It possibly doesn't help that raw files are likely to be especially heavy. burnoutdv should report a bug if not done already.
- throw-the-towel 26d ago
  I don't know why, but for my needs everything except Viewnior is slow as hell.

feverzsj 26d ago

That's some really ... general name.

hurricanepootis 26d ago
The actual app and binary is called koko, but shows up as "Photos" cause it's named that in the desktop file.
neilalexander 26d ago
Naming should be general. Ask a new user whether names like Dolphin, Okular, Kdenlive, Kate, Gwenview and Dragon are even remotely discoverable. KDE application naming is so consistently terrible that their default application launcher has to subtitle them with descriptions.
- account42 26d ago
  No it really shouldn't. Try finding help with a problem with you're having with "photos". In an open source operating system you shouldn't have marketing people trying to compete for what is the one and only photo viewer or file browser so you need actual names to tell them apart. > KDE application naming is so consistently terrible that their default application launcher has to subtitle them with descriptions. So they are discoverable after all and that is a problem how?
  - neilalexander 26d ago
    It's not about fighting over the "one and only", it's about sane human-friendly defaults. A desktop environment can and should express opinions over those defaults, because they are what make or break the experience for a new or novice user. If a power user wants to swap things out, rename/disambiguate them or whatever then ultimately nothing stops them. The subtitles are a user interface bandaid that has to exist because the naming is bad. With discoverable naming, the bandaid would not be needed. When you keep compounding bandaids, user experience breaks down.
  - varun_ch 26d ago

kdjdjdjfjsjd 26d ago

A decently looking KDE application? I’m proper amazed. (And I’m not even joking).

kdjdjdjfjsjd 26d ago
This was meant complimentarily, mind you. KDE apps more often than not tend to land on the “so full of options with conflicting text hierarchy, icons and weird spacing rules” that opening a KDE app sometimes feels like a risking complete sensory assault. It’s truly refreshing to see a good, competent UI that doesn’t feel like the devs just gave up and made every variable a button with some insane icon. Kudos KDE Photos team.
- Melonai 25d ago
  Absolutely agree here, and this is the main reason why I'm stuck on GNOME (despite not being perfectly happy with it), and why I find it interesting how many people on the internet and here especially love using KDE so much! Don't get me wrong, the KDE project is great, and the design language has notably improved over the recent years, but I just can't get myself to use it! The constant design inconsistencies genuinely bother me, and badly! I find myself struggling to concentrate on work because I just end up staring at some uncentered object, or some misaligning lines, and I gave the whole environment multiple tries over the years. GNOME, despite it's inconfigurability and crazed decision making, genuinely figured out a strong design language across the board of all software under the project, and they enforce it heavily. I do wish I could enjoy using KDE one day though, maybe I should give it another try.

akimbostrawman 26d ago

Things that are missing for me: - keyboard shortcut configuration for basic controls such as next/previous image - always show all meta/exif data

account42 26d ago

Gwenview is already the sleek image viewer alternative compared to fully-featured programs. > But development on Gwenview has slowed Good, it doesn't need constant changes.

Oxodao 26d ago

eye-of-gnome was nearly perfect. But the "modernization" (e.g. GTK4 and some small ux changes) made me un-usable for me. I settled on eye-of-mate but there's still a few things I'd rather change (e.g. with zoomed-in pictures you can't use left/right arrow to go to the next one in the folder because now it move the viewport of the zoomed picture). It's really unfortunate that those UX changes are not behind flags (I would have no issue with those being turned on by default which I could revert back easily) EDIT/ But to be fair its more related at everything related to GTK4 for me, All the GTK3-era app were amazing, now I can't stand any of them and it pretty much made me switch to QT equivalent for most of them