7 Best Free/Open-source Image Viewers for Linux

An image viewer (also known as image browser) is a desktop application that can quickly display or handle stored graphical images in different graphics file formats. It can render images according to properties of the display such as display resolution, color depth, and color profile. Other image viewers have advanced features like editing and web publishing.

Some Linux users may not care much on whatever image viewer they are using. But to those who are rather picky, they can always get and install other image viewers with different features to suit their needs.

Here’s a list of popular free and open source image viewers that you may want to check out:

imgSeek

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image.

Other key features:
* Transform images or batches automatically: Place text captions, change brightness, contrast, blur, etc. Apply lossless rotations automatically if jpegtran is available.
* Supported file formats are jpg, gif, bmp, png, xbm, and pnm. If you have ImageMagick installed, imgSeek will also support over 87 image formats.


Gwenview
Gwenview is an image viewer for the KDE desktop environment. While it was available in KDE 3, the KDE 4 version has a simplified user interface, making it more suitable for quickly browsing through collection of images. It provides full-screen interface that can be used to display images as a slide-show.

Other key features:
* Metadata comment editor
* Thumbnail image view of current directory
* Use of KIPI (KDE Image Plugins Interface) plugins for manipulating images


Eye of GNOME
Eye of GNOME is the official image viewer for the GNOME desktop environment. Unlike some other image viewers with advanced features, Eye of GNOME will only view images. It does, however, provide basic effects for improved viewing, such as zooming, full-screen, rotation, and transparent image background control.

Supported file formats:
* ANI - Animation
* BMP - Windows Bitmap
* Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)
* ICO - Windows Icon
* JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group
* PCX - PC Paintbrush
…And a lot more;


KSquirrel
KSquirrel is another image viewer for the KDE desktop environment with a disk navigator, file tree, thumbnails, extended thumbnails, dynamic format support, DCOP interface, KEXIF and KIPI plugins support. It supports more than 50 image formats, including PNG, JPEG, PSD, APNG, GIF, WMF, OpenEXR and many other.


gThumb
gThumb is a feature-rich image viewer and organizer for the GNOME desktop environment. It was originally based on GQView, and is designed to have a clean, simple interface. gThumb allows the filesystem to be browsed for images. They can be organized into catalogs, or viewed as a slideshow. Folders and catalogs can be bookmarked, and comments may be added to images. Many basic image-editing features are included, such as: rotation, resizing, cropping, and image enhancing filters such as color, brightness and contrast adjustment. gThumb can also export Web-based albums with various theme templates.


GQview
GQview uses the GTK+ toolkit, designed to run on the X Window System. Its key features include single click file viewing, external editor support, thumbnail preview, and zoom features. Some image management features are also included.

Other key features:
* One-click photo organizer/sorter
* Slideshow and full-screen modes
* Viewing Exif data for images


F-Spot
F-Spot is lightweight image viewer and organizer for the GNOME desktop. It aims to have an interface that is simple to use, yet still supports advanced features such as tagging images and displaying and exporting Exif and XMP metadata. All major photographic image formats are supported, including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, DNG and several vendor-specific RAW formats (CR2, PEF, ORF, SRF, CRW, MRW and RAF). Basic functions such as crop, rotate and resize are available alongside more advanced features such as red-eye removal and versioning.