Qimgv – Fast, simple image viewer | Hacker News Reader

Qimgv – Fast, simple image viewer

github.com

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.

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

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.

Yeah that makes sense. I find it a bit odd that this isn't something you can easily search for though.

I made an image viewer for large images:

https://github.com/jcupitt/vipsdisp

It should be fine with your huge PNGs. Internally it's a bit like a tiled map viewer, but it makes the tiles as you view the image with a set of background worker threads. It uses your GPU to scale and composite the set of visible tiles to your screen.

It uses openslide to let you view slide formats like SVS and MRXS, which might be handy. It also supports colour management.

Oh that's amazing, thank you for sharing!

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.

I've always been a fan of Faststone Image Viewer. It's similarly small and packed with features.

https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

Faststone is really fantastic

My favorite Faststone features: drag-to-reorder (without layout shift!), batch rename files, shortcut to open image in other program, adjustable thumbnail sizes

My favorite is FastStone MaxView - https://www.faststone.org/FSMaxViewDetail.htm

Or IrfanView

With all the plugins, IrfanView is also >30 MiB. But to its credit, those plugins cover a looot of format.

> But good lord, it's 130 MB of dlls on Windows.

What a nightmare.

I won’t be surprised if there are websites that load more than that already.

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.

Qimgv has experimental video support using libmpv.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

nomacs can preview raw files on linux

https://nomacs.org/

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).

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...

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.

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!

> it has to rasterize SVGs

...as opposed to streaming the vectors to an XY display[1]? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor

It renders them to a bitmap once, which is what you view, then. Even when zooming in, you only get the initial bitmap scaled.

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.

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?

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.

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_.

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!

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.

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.

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

I wonder if qiv, my favorite lightweight image viewer, us related somehow.

Yeah I use nsxiv. It's pretty good and I like being able to have custom keybindings to run arbitrary bash scripts.

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

Yes

Latest release dated 2021. This is almost abandonware.

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

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