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gThumb: The Free Software IrfanView

Posted by AwesomeTux on · 5 comments
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"... for a while now, I've been asked the same question on many occasions, a question I did not previously have a good answer to, "Can I use IrfanView with Debian [Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.]". Before recently my answer was always "You can't use IrfanView, as it's only available for Windows, and there isn't a good IrfanView equivalent for GNU/Linux." Well, I'm happy to say as of version 2.11.3 that I can now tell people that gThumb is as good as IrfanView, if not better."

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Comments (5)

gthumb is indeed the best image editor for what I do - I need access to the metadata in JPEGs, and gthumb and digiKam are pretty much the only image-editor-type applications that do this in Linux/Unix. While gthumb 2.11 offers better access to the metadata than 2.10 (which is what Ubuntu 10.04 reverted to in recent weeks after offering 2.11 for a while), so much changed in the interface in 2.11 that I had a hard time adapting, although I'll eventually make the move from 2.10 to 2.11, even if I have to use the Debian Sid package.

I wouldn't say gThumb is better than Irfanview, which I use in Windows. Irfanview does two things I really need that gThumb doesn't do:

sharpen images batch processing

In gthumb 2.10 (it looks like the feature "went away" in 2.11) you can call in an external editor such as GIMP to make more detailed edits yet still return to the gthumb environment. I was only modestly successful in preserving my metadata (which GIMP and Krita destroy with every save), so that's not a feature I'll miss too much in 2.11.

digiKam is theoretically more feature-packed than gthumb, and if you're in a KDE environment already it's worth using (with Kipi Plugins, which are essential), but I found it awfully clunky and suffering from menu overload. And while it has sharpen, I could never figure out how to actually sharpen an image without making it look horrible; there were lots of sharpening parameters, but all I wanted to do was sharpen like every other image editor out there - and I could never figure it out.

Gthumb does wipe, mop, sand and refinish the floor with F-Spot, by the way. F-Spot could be more useless, but I don't know how.
I've been testing Shotwell, it seems to work really well.
Another good image viewer/editor is Fotoxx. It has sharpen ;)

Its GUI needs work, but it has everything gThumb has for editing, including warp, unbend, blur, HDR, and even selections. I think Fotoxx is closer to IrfanView, except it doesn't have any batch image processes that I can see, and no video/audio.
Pressing "g" still opens the image in the gimp, from gthumb 2.11.x. Right click > Open With also works.

If the "File List Tools" extension is enabled (it should be by default) you can define custom scripts (to operate on single or multiple files) in the Tools button. Use the Tools > Personalize function.

- Mike
Thanks for the tip, mjc. I had so little time with gthumb 2.11 before Ubuntu reverted back to 2.10 that I hadn't figured much out.

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