A Qt-based photo viewer that concentrates on what photographers need.
(c) 2010-2018 Stefan Hundhammer Stefan.Hundhammer@gmx.de
Target Platforms: Linux, BSD, Unix-like systems
License: GPL V2
Status: Alpha (see below)
Updated: 2018-07-12
QPhotoView is an image viewer for photographers. It first and foremost meant as a tool to be used by photographers -- for viewing photos, for comparing different shots of the same scene, for sorting out which shots to keep and which ones to throw away, for opening them in some dedicated image processing software such as Gimp or PhotoShop, and of course for presenting them to people.
It is explicitly not meant as a one-size-fits all do-everything viewer, much less as an image manipulation tool. There are other tools that try that, and each of them fails misearably at it in one way or the other (see below: Why yet another image viewer?).
Main window screenshot
Start with the first image in a directory:
qphotoview /work/photos
Start with one specific image:
qphotoview ~/tmp/DSC_1234.jpg
In any case, you can load the next or previous image in that directory with the keyboard commands listed below.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
Q or Esc |
Quit |
Space or PgDown |
Next image in that directory |
Backspace or PgUp |
Previous image in that directory |
Home |
First image in that directory |
End |
Last image in that directory |
Return |
Toggle fullscreen or windowed mode |
+ |
Zoom in (enlarge) |
- |
Zoom out (shrink) |
F or M |
Zoom to fit into the window without scrolling |
W |
Zoom to fit window width (scroll vertically) |
H |
Zoom to fit window height (scroll horizontally) |
B |
Best zoom for window width or height (scroll in the other dimension) |
1 |
100% zoom (1:1 pixels) |
(more to come)
| Mouse Gesture | Action |
|---|---|
| Drag left | Drag (scroll) image (if zoomed) |
| Double click left | Zoom in |
| Double click middle | Zoom out |
| Click right | Context menu |
| Mouse wheel down | Next image in that directory |
| Mouse wheel up | Previous image in that directory |
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By default, show one image cleanly without user interface clutter
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Blazingly fast
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Very easy navigation through all images in a directory
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Caches pre-scaled images in that directory for very fast display
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By default, zoom the image to fit on the screen without the need for scrolling
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When zoomed in, show a navigation thumbnail of the image in the corner with a colored rectangle indicating which part of the image is currently visible, just like all digital cameras do (but surprisingly most image viewers don't)
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Full screen by default (use
Returnto toggle to windowed mode) -
Hide the mouse cursor after a short timeout for the least possible distraction
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Active window borders for user interface elements
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Show important (!) EXIF data (right window border)
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Concentrates on what photographers need, not meaningless tech clutter
Alpha
It's a stable alpha, but still alpha - i.e. it's far from feature complete.
It is usable, but it can't do much yet. It shouldn't crash, and it should not endanger your images or your image directories in any way.
The only files it will modify are its log files in /tmp/qphotoview-$USER.
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Only very rudimentary GUI
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No configuration of any kind yet (neither GUI nor via config file)
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Uses only one CPU core for background tasks (load and pre-scale images)
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Knows no limits for RAM usage yet - will happily load and pre-scale as many images as are found in the image directory. If that means it will consume all your RAM and all your swap space, this is just what it will do.
So for the time being, simply don't start it with a single directory containing 10.000+ photos.
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No deleting images yet (nor any other kind of modification of your images or your image directories)
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No sending images to GIMP or any other image processor yet
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No directory selection while the program is running; you will have to terminate it and start it with another directory.
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No thumbnail preview of an entire directory yet
cd 3rdparty/exiv2*
cmake .
make
sudo make install
cd ../..
qmake
make
sudo make install
You neeed a working C++ compiler environment and Qt 5.x. On most Linux distributions, you will have to install the -devel (openSUSE) or -dev (Debian/Ubuntu) packages for Qt which include the header files and development tools like "qmake" and "moc".
Please make sure you can compile and run simple "Hello, world" type Qt programs before contacting us because of build problems.
This might be a bit outdated, but it's still mostly true
Short version: Because the other ones (at least the ones that are available on Linux / X11) all suck. They all suck in different ways, but they definitely all suck.
The only one that sucked a lot less (kuickshow) than all the others went out of active development a long time ago, and it will go out of maintenance in the near future.
KDE's Gwenview is what comes closest, but it sucks in very subtle ways. While recent versions (as of mid-2010) at least display images quick enough to enable comparing them, it still leaves much to be desired. Its metadata display is, just like ALL other viewers, just horrible. I really don't give a shit about the JPEG compression algorithm used or other useless crap the EXIF data contain. But I do need the exposure time, the aperture, ISO speed, focal length, and maybe what lens was used. Is there any way to display this in Gwenview (and not all that other stuff)? I don't think so. If it's there, it is very well hidden. Also, deleting the current image is an operation that is (at least in the default configuration) unreasonably difficult. Hell, when I just imported images from my camera and I see one that is out of focus, I want to get rid of it quickly -- hit [Delete] or D (or whatever) and good-bye.
KDE's digiKam is an attempt of a one-tool-does-everything program. It insists on managing all images in its (MySQL or whatever) data base which is not what I want: I have FILES. I want to be able to rsync them to my USB hard drive, to my home NAS, to some other machine. I do not want to depend on somebody else's idea of what an image data base should look like. I also don't want its gazillion of image processing plug-ins for red eye correction and whatever. Maybe they are what some people want, but I want to stick with my favourite image processing software (Gimp for want of something better on the Linux / X11 platform). It is overloaded with features I don't want, but it lacks most of the features I do want -- like rapidly displaying all files of a given directory in sequence, deleting individual ones, or displaying the meta data that are relevant (!) for photography.
GNOME's F-Spot is a Mono-driven program. Too bad it wants to taint my machine with something as evil as Mono. Maybe F-Spot is great, but I will never know it since it wants me to install that Mono resource hog which is not going to happen. Anyway, it's GNOME which means Gtk look and feel which reminds me of the early 1990s. Plus, I don't like the GNOME people's ideas of usability.
'xv' was great at its days. But those days (the early 1990s) are long past. Today, it's just a crude leftover of days gone by. Plus, what were they thinking with the way it keeps distorting image proportions? Hell, the only thing NOBODY ever wants in an image viewer is changing the width/height aspect ratio. This was insane even back in the 1990s, but even more insane is the fact that this was kept like this during all that time.
See file Contributing.md and GitHub-Workflow.md