Interesting Tools: Image Viewers

As I geek around, searching for ways to procrastinate my coursework more efficiently, I occasionally run across programs that are noteworthy enough to blog about. Sometimes, it’s features; Sometimes, it’s another design aspect, but it happens often enough that I’ve decided to start sharing them. Take note that most of them won’t work on Windows though.

For my first installment, I’ll start with image programs:

Gliv: Although I consider it to be a little lacking in the features department, this interesting little image viewer uses OpenGL to offload image scaling to your GPU. Definitely something to check out if your current image viewer is set to scale images and feels sluggish.

imgSeek: While the thumbnail-loading code could be improved (if you open a folder containing lots of images, you can’t do anything until it’s finished loading all of the thumbnails), this PyQt-based image viewer has a rather unique feature: You can sketch a thumbnail of what you’re looking for as a search method. Not effective for the kind of subtleties I need to find (only manual-classification can help me find that kind of stuff again), but neat nonetheless.

Then there’s the “interesting names” department:

• PornView: Who says there’s no truth in advertising? This image viewer isn’t half-bad, but I still think GQView is better.
• GQView: I don’t know what it stands for, but a big thanks to them for making sure that the first two letters are unique so that I can use bash tab-completion to easily get the full program name.
• Gwenview: A KDE application with no K in it’s name!? Gasp!

Interesting Tools: Image Viewers by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.