Irfanview nearest equivalent for linux

IrfanView is a wonderful freeware Windows swiss-army-knife for image viewing & editing.

For me, the key features are fast viewing, simple editing (crop, contrast, brigthness, rotation, resampling), file operations (delete, copy to folder) and extended image information access (exif data) combined in the same interface. Versatile batch jobs are a very nice bonus.

But unfortunately IrfanView is for Windows only, and isn't free software. What would be the nearest equivalent for linux?

Ilari Kajaste

Posted 2009-11-13T07:33:18.357

Reputation: 3 282

Irfanview runs in Wine. It's a little finicky, but it does work. – fixer1234 – 2015-10-07T23:27:06.640

@fixer1234: there a few problems with running IrfanView with wine: you can't pass full file paths properly from file managers if they contain special characters, videos don't play because of lack of codecs etc. – Dan Dascalescu – 2017-01-09T04:17:51.763

See Ubuntu replacement for IrfanView on AskUbuntu.

– Dan Dascalescu – 2017-01-09T04:18:44.720

@DanDascalescu, yeah, a lot of that functionality is limited, but the features that do work are still better than anything else. My opinion is that there is no replacement for Irfanview, on Linux or Windows. :-) – fixer1234 – 2017-01-09T04:26:21.250

Answers

I heart IrfanView. Although for Gnome, I use gthumb as my Linux equivalent. It doesn't have the myriad of swiss-tools that IV has, but quality scaling, cropping and color adjustment suits me well enough. I do love how gthumb imports photos from my camera :D

invert

Posted 2009-11-13T07:33:18.357

Reputation: 4 918

Well well, gthumb seems to be quite an excellent equivalent! I wonder why it doesn't come built in with Ubuntu. Many thanks for the tip! – Ilari Kajaste – 2009-11-14T14:56:30.320

As a Kubuntu user, I've stuck with the default image viewer for KDE - Gwenview. It's sufficient for everyday operations and I believe you can even extend it with plugins.

And yes, GIMP goes without saying, although it might be too bloated for quick edits. ;)

Illianthe

Posted 2009-11-13T07:33:18.357

Reputation: 221

+1 gwenview is enough for simple editing, without the need to fire up GIMP. – sybreon – 2009-11-13T09:13:36.283

AlternativeTo.net

Personally, I think Picasa from Google is pretty good, although it is not open source.

JRT

Posted 2009-11-13T07:33:18.357

Reputation: 633

Not sure why this was downvoted. I'd +1 but for some reason Super User is telling me my vote can't be changed (bug?). – Sasha Chedygov – 2009-11-13T08:38:17.103

I don't know a single solution unfortunately, I ended up using kuickshow for viewing (its the fastest viewer I have seen so far) and the most basic operations, and GIMP for everything else.

Grzenio

Posted 2009-11-13T07:33:18.357

Reputation: 2 599

Paint Mono is a linux port of Paint.NET of windows but hasn't been updated since 2008.

ukanth

Posted 2009-11-13T07:33:18.357

Reputation: 9 930

Firstly Irfanview is free and always has been. Where the OP got the notion that it is otherwise I don't know.

Second - the is no viable alternative. XNview sucks at best and wielding GiMP is this case is like opening PhotoShop to simply look at a file and maybe rename it (total overkill).

Most of the native Linux apps I have looked at want to behave like Lightroom - import everything their own folders and image database, not my structures or ad-hoc folders. I forget which one (but it was in several top-10 reviews), where I wanted to add jPeg comments - easy in Irfanview... the comments ended up in some meta archive for that app, not as part of the image. And so it goes on.

I have found that Irfanview's author is quite open to positive encouraging comments. If he is approached nicely (not so as to anger him), he may even create us a native Linux version. Thinking especially as the Season of Disaster is about to birth Windoze 8.

Jason

Posted 2009-11-13T07:33:18.357

Reputation: 1

I did approach the author several years ago, and he nicely informed me that he didn't know anything about Linux. However, Irfanview will run in wine. You just need to copy a dll file (mfc42.dll) from a Windows system into wine. Instructions here: http://www.boekhoff.info/?pid=linux&tip=install-irfan-view-on-linux. I did it and it works.

– fixer1234 – 2016-07-17T10:39:41.273

2Irfanview is freeware for commercial use. That's not free. Free means free for any use + source code available. – AnonymousLurker – 2012-07-28T09:19:18.187

-1

The standard answer is GIMP of course. But you might also like ImageMagick for batch processing.

Suppressingfire

Posted 2009-11-13T07:33:18.357

Reputation: 1 158

3GIMP, really? I've of course been using that for image editing, but the power of IrfanView is having editing and viewing in same interface. When I'm browsing images, I don't have to "open them for editing", I can just edit. Also, GIMP takes time to open and has an overly cluttered interface for doing a simple tone adjustment, resample, crop or image type conversion. – Ilari Kajaste – 2009-11-13T08:17:46.567