


It does its job well enough: it lets you view images. Eye of GNOME is no where near as featured as the image viewers on other platforms, including Chrome OS Ubuntu’s default image viewer is ‘ Eye of GNOME ‘ (often referred to by the package name of ‘ eog ‘). I'm willing to build stuff from source if it's necessary (I'm assuming it will be in this situation), but would like to avoid having to also build a long list of dependencies. Ubuntu needs a better default image viewer and in this post I explain why. What ways are there of getting a J2K-capable image viewer on Ubuntu 20.04.1? I'd like to avoid Snaps and unofficial PPAs if at all possible. The version of GIMP provided in 20.04 is capable of natively opening JPEG 2000 files, but it's a full-blown image editor and not fast/convenient enough replacement for an image viewer.
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This would be much more convenient if I had an image viewer capable of displaying JPEG 2000 images instead of having to convert them to TIF files to see their content.įrom what I've seen, no image viewing or photo management software found in the Ubuntu 20.04 repositories supports JPEG 2000 files, presumably due to potential patent issues with the format. Ubuntu should ship with a modern image viewer, like Shotwell, to anticipate and cater to those needs.I've been working with batches of JPEG 2000 (.jp2) files recently. We all use images way more than we used to. This makes the app look rather out of place on the modern Linux desktop. Shotwell is clinging to its old-style app menu. Eye of GNOME might be frills-free but it looks like a modern GTK3 app thanks to its header bar. It certainly has a few areas where it’s lacking, as this chart shows: Feature I rarely need to rotate an image, certainly no where near enough to need on-screen controls plastered over every photo I view.Įye of GNOME also lacks a couple of basic image editing features that the Shotwell image viewer natively provides, like image cropping and ratio resizing. Unless there’s been a sudden uptick in the sale of digital cameras from the 1990s, why does rotating deserve omnipresent controls on every image? Now, I’m not advocating that eog transition to a full-fledged photo management app, but I do think that some thought should be given towards modern expectations and needs.įor instance, when I open an image eog I get four on-screen button: prev/next image and rotate left/rotate right: Do they need to be on screen all the time (like they are in Shotwell)? Probably not. Having essential editing features available in an image viewer saves me time. It also supports other document formats as well, includin PS and DjVu.
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I don’t need to load my image in an external app to make edits (then save the image, then open the image in the imagine viewer again to check it’s the edited copy). qpdfview is a tabbed document viewer for Linux that uses Poppler for PDF support. Shotwell caters to all of that, within the same app, and in the same window. From gifs and selfies, to screenshots and wallpapers.Īnd, like many, I tend to view an image as the first step in a longer chain, usually to check that txhe photo in question is the one I’m looking to share or send or post or whatever else I want to do with it.Īs part of that flow I usually make some basic edits, like cropping and resizing /converting the image to a lossy format. Thanks to smartphones, social networks, and ephemeral messaging services we send and receive more images than ever before.
