The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

Posted Mar 24, 2004 6:21 UTC (Wed) by ctg (guest, #3459)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

It's hard to tell wether or not you've really looked at ImageMagick. I had completely forgotten about Xv - it must be five or six years since I last used it. I'm using ImageMagick for the kinds of things that I would have used xv for.

Comparing against your criteria:

The ability to quickly step through a set of images, preferably with an easy keystroke (such as the space bar).

ImageMagick can do this with the "display" program. "display *.png" or whatever. Space to go forwards. Backspace to go back. Completely clean interface with no superfluous controls - unless you click on the image. Very nice.

Display of images in their natural resolution whenever possible.

Yes. Nice panning feature if the image is too big for the screen.

Fast operations for cropping and resizing images, and for saving the result.

Yes. A few mouse clicks. Could be faster as there is no toolbox - so the menu has to be navigated. But not really a big problem. The big plus with ImageMagick is that you can also do all these things on the command line.

The ability to take a screenshot of another application is a nice bonus.

Yes. With the "import" command.

Also nice, but less important, is the sort of quick color table tweaking that xv supports.

Yes. With some caveats. I don't do much of this so can't really compare with how xv does it. But you can fiddle with contrast, hue etc. Various effects and so forth. "man display" gives a pretty good idea of the feature set.

I find it surprising that ImagicMagick isn't the complete replacement - you don't really say why it doesn't do what you want it to do - which makes me think you are missing out on something.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

Posted Mar 24, 2004 8:48 UTC (Wed) by vondo (guest, #256) [Link]

I just looked at the color control part of "display" and it's kind of kludgy. To change something, it fires up a text box, you type in a new value, and press enter. Maybe you like the change, maybe not.

The cool thing abut xv as I recall was that you could move sliders, pull the gamma curves around, all graphically.

I miss that.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

Posted Mar 24, 2004 11:24 UTC (Wed) by jbh (guest, #494) [Link]

But it's so slow that it's unusable on my (admittedly aging) box. About five seconds to wait before next image is displayed (when resizing is necessary). Other viewers like ida or gthumb are around 1/2 sec.

The display program is not usable

Posted Mar 24, 2004 12:01 UTC (Wed) by cfischer (guest, #3983) [Link] (2 responses)

For casual users, who once in a while want to crop
an image and save it in a different format,
the display program is like hell.

I've recently tried it; I'm a Debian user
who misses xv severely.

The user interface for cut-and-paste is the epitome
of unusability.

The display program is not usable

Posted Mar 24, 2004 16:45 UTC (Wed) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm a Debian user who misses xv severely.

Grab the sources and build it. It builds very easily on Debian. Then use checkinstall to build the .deb and install that.

The display program is not usable

Posted Mar 25, 2004 7:57 UTC (Thu) by mow (guest, #955) [Link]

You don't even have to compile yourself.
Just look at the unofficial APT repositories at
http://www.apt-get.org/ and search for xv