GPicView, extremely fast image viewer for Gnome

[PCMan]

hi PCman,

i have some question and request:

(1) why didn;t Gpicview view pic by the sequence of the filename? i got the photos randomly jumping for 1 file to the next when i press the next button. Is there a place to setup?
It's a fixed bug. Please upgrade to the latest version.

(2) can u add quick resize funtion? i hate to fire-up other application just for the sake of resizing the photo much appreciated

I'd like to.
However, I don't know how to add this and keep the user interface clean and simple at the same time. Any suggestion?
Some GUI mock-up will be helpful.

[Polygon]

just have a button that looks like a scaling button (like a small box in a corner, then a larger box overlapping it in the right corner) and when you click that, it asks for dimensions, along with a box to keep aspect ratio and all that and a ok / cancel button. that would work.

[pt123]

Love this app. too, very much like the Windows Image Fax Viewer on XP.

[PCMan]

Sorry, no exciting new features or important bug fixes.

But the ugly icons was replaced by better ones. (Good news!)
Besides, new locales fr and nl were added.
In addition, now you can set GPicView the default viewer of supported image types from the preference dialog, which is cool. (* xdg-mime is needed here)

So, GPicView 0.1.8 is released.
Ubuntu deb package for Feisty/Gutsy was provided here.
http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php/GPicView

Cheers!

[ubu-for]

GPicView is an extremely fast and user-friendly image viewer for Linux desktop.

I like your program!

But I miss two features. If I press the "F" key gThumb switches between fullscreen and the normal screen and if I press "Home"/"End" key gThumb jumps to the first/last picture.

I know you've set the fullscreen feature to the "F11" key, but maybe in your next version the user could change this hotkey in the preferences.

Thanks in advance!

[graabein]

Good stuff PCMan! I'm going to use this on my Xfce box and try it on my main also. One minor thing I can't get is the name, GPicView, cause it's pure GTK? Shouldn't it be called PCManPV or PCManPic or something?



I love your work. Keep it up!

[Gen2ly]

This is well done so far. Except for feh this loads pictures faster than any other application I've tried. It browses all images in a directory, and resizes them - about all I need. A couple differing preference... perhaps. I like it when the gnome theme defines the window background (see pic), and the control bar is Bill the Cat... Windows.

[ubu-for]

Do I have to compile the new version 0.1.9 or will there be a deb-file in the near future?

Is it possible to hide the (next, previous, zoom) buttons?

THX for your great work!

[energy.]

I like this. thanks!

[jackpipe]

Nice and fast, good job, and thank you.

A couple of observations - obviously these are my own personal preferences, and I don't mean to criticize gpicview which I think is a really good job, but I've tried to state the reasons I think things should work the way I describe.
BTW, I'm using version 0.1.7-1, on ubuntu 8.04 - the build tools on here are not new enough to compile the 0.2 gpicview source.:


The fit button should fit (ie stretch) images that are smaller than the window size.
I see you are calling the fit function hardcoded with FALSE for the can_strech boolean:

main_win_fit_window_size( mw, FALSE, GDK_INTERP_BILINEAR );

So images are not stretched to fit windows that are larger than the source image. I know this is also the way other viewers work, but it makes no sense to me. If I want to view the image at original size, I can use the "1:1" function. But there is no way to stretch smaller images to fit the window size, without manually zooming.


Mouse scroll-wheel should zoom. I tried version 0.1.10, but there is a major usability problem here, to me. The mouse scroll wheel in 0.1.7 zooms in and out of the image. In 0.1.10, the mouse wheel "scrolls" through the images in the current directory. Can we change this back, or make it an option?

first-person shooter zoom directionTo me, the mouse-wheel zoom works the wrong way also. Moving the mouse wheel forward, ie scroll down, should zoom in. The reason, is that moving the mouse wheel forward feels like "I want to move forward", sort of like a first-person shooter. When I move forward the image should zoom in. This is also the way the compiz zoom-desktop function works for example. I know that's not intuitive to everyone though.


Zooming should zoom into the mouse location, not keep the origin at 0,0. When you zoom into an image, when the image becomes larger than the window, further zooming always keeps the top-left of the image fixed to the top-left of the window. Say you're trying to zoom in to a particular country on a big map. You keep having to pan the image, because the position of the country changes as you zoom in. The zoom should zoom in to the mouse position. For the case where you really do want to keep the image at top-left, maybe the buttons should default to zooming in to 0,0. But even here, the obvious thing is for the buttons to zoom in to the center of the window, and you cn pan the image in order to center the part of the image you want to zoom. This is also another reason why the mouse-wheel should zoom - since it's impossible to zoom into the mouse location when you're using the mouse to press the zoom button.


The control panel should be at the top. OK, maybe I'm weird in this way, but I think the research shows it's quicker when the controls are at the top. The reason, is simply that application menu bars, and window controls (minimize/maximize/etc) are nearly always at the top, and if all the controls are near each other, you don't have to move the moouse so far, and you can keep your mouse movements accurate since you have a smaller area to cover. I have my gnome panel (just one, with everything on it) set to be always at the top of the screen. My firefox tabs, and url bar are at the top. Application menu bars are at the top. The alternative would be to have all the controls (including application menus, window controls etc) at the bottom, or the side. All in the same place, anyway. Maybe the control panel location could be an option?


GPicView should stay focused as a viewer. I think you should avoid requests to add more image manipulation features, since this is after an an image VIEWER. Image rotate is useful because many cameras screw up the image orientation, but I don't think other features are useful in a viewer. I see you added flip_v, and flip_h, in 0.1.10, which were already present in the DCT transform routines, so I guess it didn't add much to the code, but I can't really see the value. Perhaps "brightness" and "contrast" might be useful features, but I would strip out the save-file functionality entirely - if I want to edit an image, I want some control over the quality of the transformations, the compression quality, etc, etc, and I would use a proper image EDITOR for this.


Animated gif support would be fantastic. I think gthumb shows animated gifs, but otherwise you have to load them into your browser, which isn't a great image viewer.


Initial window size problem with tiff image. I have a tiff image that causes the initial window to open bigger than my screen (1400x1024). Everything else works fine, just the initial window opens with the control panel off the bottom of the screen (another reason the controls should be at the top?).



Anyway, thanks again for writing gPicView - once I get ubuntu upgraded here, I'll probably make some of these changes to the code myself - but I'm not clued in to open source development, so not sure how I'd submit code for your consideration.