Displaying a sequence of images in Linux

I'm generating a sequence of images saved as .PNG files on disk, labelled say plot001.png, plot002.png, plot003.png. These are actually saved plots from Octave, a scientific data manipulation/plotting tool.

There are about 50-200 of these images.

I want to animate them on screen so I can see each frame displayed sequentially with my own specified pause between each frame (typically 200ms). I also want to be able to manually single step forwards and backwards in the sequence with a simple keypress.

I am not trying to create a video! I could use ffmpeg or something similar, but the resulting video would be compressed, hard to control frame by frame, and only 2 seconds long.

Several Windows image display tools like irfanview have a feature for this.. it allows you to play a slideshow with definable pause between the frames, and you can also just arrow left and right to manually control. This is perfect.

Is there a image preview tool for Linux that would give me this easy sequence viewing method? I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 if that matters.

BobBanana

Posted 2009-12-18T19:27:24.117

Reputation: 167

Answers

Gwenview, which is available in Ubuntu 9.10, support that.

You can start a slideshow of any directory/images. Its default pause between images is 5 seconds, but you can configure it as you want. You can also step forward by pressing space or backward by pressing backspace.

Laurent Parenteau

Posted 2009-12-18T19:27:24.117

Reputation: 648

This works pretty well. Surprisingly the slideshow timing is NOT configurable, but as a ad-hoc solution I can change my key repeat speed and hold down the space bar. Thanks! – BobBanana – 2009-12-19T02:14:56.640

@BobBanana When the slideshow is running, and you move your mouse at the top of the screen, a "toolbar" should appear. Click on "Configure full-screen mode" (the wrench icon). In the popup menu, the first thing should be a slider to adjust the timing. At least, in Gwenview 2.3.2 – Laurent Parenteau – 2009-12-19T03:52:44.443

From imagemagick:

animate -pause *.jpg

You can also use mplayer:

mplayer mf://*.jpg -mf fps=10

simonp

Posted 2009-12-18T19:27:24.117

Reputation: 616

The animate in the imagemagick-6.q16 package (v8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-16ubuntu2.3) fails because -pause requires a time in seconds argument like -pause 1. Even with that, it fails in that it only shows the first image, not the later ones. – agc – 2018-08-26T18:42:27.980