Lightgallery: Electron and Node.js-based image viewer for Mac, Windows and Linux | Hacker News Reader

Lightgallery: Electron and Node.js-based image viewer for Mac, Windows and Linux

sachinchoolur.github.io

41 pointssachinchoolur46 comments

This is good and all but anyone else see a problem with electron apps for everything? all these apps built with electron really clogging my ram.

If Electron means that people actually make cross platform apps, I'm all for it. Slightly suboptimal apps are better than no apps or discontinued apps.

Me too, but there should be some way to share resources between them

Shouldn't that be the OS's task? My kernel knowledge is rusty but I remember reading about concepts such as DLL/SO sharing, memory page sharing, etc.

This works for libraries/frameworks installed in a common place, like /usr/lib or /Library/Frameworks.

But, all those apps ship their own copy of Electron, so there is no simple way for OS to share pages.

Well, then this seems more of a packaging problem than an actual tech problem.

In an ideal world that would be the next step if the app reaches a large audience. I'm not sure that from the upstream developer's point of view the investment of limited resources into per-OS packaging is a good idea at this stage...

It only uses slightly more memory than Eye Of Gnome. If that's the price I have to pay for desktop apps with a better UI, I'll pay it.

slight you say? eog 8.1MB vs lightgallery 60MB for same image file.

Even when opening EoG without any image, it uses 25MB here. Are you using the values from the system monitor? Pretty sure those are not very accurate.

yup 6.1MB confirmed with top, without image

Javascript is the new Flash Player

JavaScript is becoming what Java set out to do, but in a way that works for users.

And not in a way for engineers that want to host applications, or people who care about single threaded web-frame apps chewing up their laptops battery and RAM.

I wouldn't blame JavaScript.

Lots of people didn't blame Adobe either...

It solves the problem of people not upgrading their PCs. /s

for sure

A bit of feedback. Since is a user facing app, the front page needs to be tidied up a bit.

"Modern image viewer" = decent. It is a sales pitch so at least you included something regular users would want to read about.

Electron and NodeJS = bad. Only developers care about that. IMO keep that in the "About" page or just on Github.

"View on Github" is a bit redundant, you already have a tab for that.

Make the Download button bigger and more prominent. I believe the standard color for download buttons is green.

Core features: again, the first feature ("Electron") should go. The other 5 are valid for users. BTW, IMO pull a summary of those features as part of the slogan aka sales pitch used above.

Settings: make that a separate page. It's super scary for regular users.

Also: list the file formats supported somewhere on the home page, preferably in a section which is easily visible. If the file format list isn't yet as big as you want, you could list some of the formats you plan to support soon (but mark the "work in progress" ones clearly.

Cool project!

Thank you for the valuable feedbacks. I agree with almost all of the above points. I will update the home page ASAP

Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see anything indicating what image formats it supports.

I assume it supports JPEG and PNG, but does it support all the various versions of TIFF (there are a lot of these)? Does it support raw images (Canon/Nikon/PhaseOne/etc)? Does it support PSD? How about GIFs and video formats?

Unless I'm wrong, and I missed it, this might have been useful information to include in the "Core Features" section.

Lightgallery supports jpg, png, gif and webp image formats. Information about image formats is available on github readme section

wait, what? so you have to go to the github page to find out what sort of images the tool your downloading can display?

Sorry for the inconvenience. I will add it on the home page too.. :)

It's a shame that HN is almost completely incapable of having productive discussions regarding Electron-based apps (especially Atom). Yes they're bigger downloads than "necessary", and yes they use more ram than a native app probably would for the same task. We get it.

Feedbacks on OSX: - "Pinch with 2 fingers" on trackpad should zoom, not move to other pictures - I would like to be able to move very quickly from picture to picture with the right/left arrow (as fast as the Picasa photo viewer on Windows), but I cannot switch to the next photo until the animation is over, therefore I cannot see more than 1 or 2 photo per second (too slow when I want to browse hundreds of photos to find the one I'm looking for).

Thanks for your feedback. If you want to find any particular images you can easily find it from thumbnails strip of from pagers. If you want to move between images quickly you can decrease the speed of animation from menu > view > speed > numbers.

>modern

With the fad of bundling up web browsers and web code into an app this phrase is starting to have negative connotations for me.

You can't have it both ways right now, as there's no desktop application framework that offers modern UI features.

a few suggestions:

- crop the image or fix just the height in the thumbnail section so they don't get distorted. Electron means it's with CSS, right? the background image can crop via CSS.

- don't make the user wait for the animation until he can interact again. I want to tap the arrow keys twice fast to quickly skip ahead.

- hide bars delay and animation speed should be set much faster by default.

- hide bars should include the thubmnails button

- fullscreen deserves a button.

- menu bar should dissappier in fullscreen (I'm on windows)

- auto-add all images of that folder if just one image is opened (this is default in windows and I see mac people stumble to show a few pictures in big all the time)

- hide the thumbnail list by default so the auto-add does not add clutter

- the black bar on top is mostly empty in the middle and just occludes the picture, maybe just a small rectangle for the controls was better.

- I think a more discrete border with the thumbnails would look better (50% grey, 1px, 2px rounded edge. white or turquoise for current image)

- most of the settings should be hidden in an advanced section

- on windows it does not seem to register the file associations

- on windows I'd like to be able to choose the installation path

- nitpicking: the logo/icon does not work well in 16x16px

Thanks. I will try to include some of the features in the next version.

I installed it, but the functionality to open a picture from the menu (file -> open and then select the picture through a dialog box) doesn't work (and it doesn't show anything on the command line). It works fine when I drag the file to the app window though. For what is worth I use Debian 8 with Node.js 2.14.2

Thank you for the feedback. I will check it and get back to you.

Its really awesome app.I am using ubuntu and no image viewer was available for ubuntu with this much features.

Thanks. I am glad that you like lightgallery.

supports 31 image transitions and 4 file formats

Sorry to be that guy, but the fact that it is built in Electron is not a "core feature". It does not benefit the end user in any way

Technically you could use the same application (as in, same UI and features) across the three major OSs.

(Although you could make the same argument for something written, say, in Java)

The notion that "you could use the same application across the three major OSs" is the feature – the feature is not that it uses Electron. That it uses Electron to accomplish the feature is incidental.

It scales

Scale what? Humans can still only look at a couple of images at a time... (or was that a joke?)

It was a joke :)

But the new benchmarks say MySql is faster, why should I use that instead of this image viewer ?

That's a serious step up from Lightbox etc. and certainly better than at least the Windows picture viewer. Nice work.

Thanks for the nice feedback,i really appreciate it :)

A bloated 35 Mb installer app just to view images ? Why thank you, but my 4 mb xnviewer which starts instantly is better.

There are users who like their applications to have a nice UI.

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