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)
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.
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.
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.
My favorite Faststone features: drag-to-reorder (without layout shift!), batch rename files, shortcut to open image in other program, adjustable thumbnail sizes
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.
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).
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.
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...
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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.
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.
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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.
https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
What a nightmare.
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 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).
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.
https://nomacs.org/
I'm thinking about getting to know c++, to maintain this project, until the og dev comes back...