How can I view pictures via ssh

Question

I am monitoring a website and want to know if there is a way that I can view the pictures via ssh rather than loading the website each time.

Answer 1

You haven't said what Operating System you are connecting from. If you are using a *nix running an X server, you can use ssh X forwarding. This will enable you to run graphical applications on the remote server and have them displayed on the local machine. For example:

ssh -Y user@server
eog pictures/foo.png

Assuming the server has eog installed, this should cause the image to be opened and displayed on your screen.

For future reference, when asking questions on this site it is a good idea to specify the system you are using because the correct answer will often depend on it.

Answer 2

if you are on OS X, using iTerm2, you can do imgcat and display the image right in the terminal.

https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-images.html

Answer 3

This is a common pain point amongst computer vision researchers. I created a tiny script (https://github.com/nicodjimenez/ImgView) which I use to serve images in a directory on a remote machine via python run.py -d path/to/image/dir/. Then I use ssh tunneling to forward a local port to the remote port on which I am running the server, and then I just view the images on my local machine by pointing my web browser to my local port, by default http://0.0.0.0:8000/. This approach is the most flexible for viewing images over ssh because you can control the appearance of the display.

Answer 4

tiv (or similar tools) should do in most cases. This does not require any special terminal emulators since it only prints RGB ANSI codes.

Also supports wildcards.

Answer 5

On Linux you could redirect ssh output. With the help of an image viewer able to read from the standard input (see Is there an image viewer that takes images on STDIN? ) and the Unix Pipe |, I get:

ssh remote_host "cat /remote/path/to/image" | display

PS: this requires ImageMagick's display program on the local host. The command between quotes is executed by ssh on the remote host. Or for other image viewers (here Gnome eog image viewer):

FIFO=$(mktemp -u);
ssh remote_host "cat /remote/path/to/image" > "$FIFO";
eog  "$FIFO" && rm "$FIFO";

Answer 6

In general you may transfer the media data, e.g. images, to your local desktop or the ssh terminal itself if capable of displaying media:

• XWindow forwarding: brings any desktop imageviewer application from the remote host to your display
• sftp: any sftp-client transfers the media to your local desktop where you may launch an image viewer
• ssh filesystem: a bit like sftp, but the remote filesystem is seamlessly integrated locally so local image viewers may launch
• Or webbased: This terminal (like many others) is itself capable of displaying image data (the image data is "cat"ed !)

http://liftoffsoftware.com/Products/GateOne

Answer 7

You can add a network storage in your systemfile explorer :

Adding a server

Answer 8

Visual Studio Code's SSH extension lets you view remote images in the editor. It's cross-platform and does not require a local X server.

Answer 9

If you have the path of the pictures you can like Frank Thomas said then you can download them and open them in a picture viewer via scp or maybe sftp if you have access. If you're using linux then do a wget on the pictures, but of course you can't open them in a shell, so downloading them is you best option if you are talking purely shell.

Answer 10

You can also use sshfs, if you're under Linux.

Answer 11

I use thunar (a file manager, also works with nautilus and probably others) to do this kind of stuff.

If you enter the address:

sftp://user@ip:port/

It will connect via ssh (optionally asking for a password/passphrase) and it will display the filesystem visually, where you can open the images with a viewer (eg. gpicview or eog, but I found eog to be slow in this case).