Gwenview is nice. Wayland native, pretty snappy, JXL support, portal support, its simply a good modern Linux application.
But I personally still use XNViewMP, which is a still proprietary but cross-platform clone of IrfanView for Windows. Also XNConvert is really nice, as it does all the batch converting you would want to do.
batch conversion for whole folders, output parameters and all, multicore usage
before/after comparisons of tools
XNViewMP is available as a Flatpak, you can disable internet access at least. But it doesnt seem to be developed anymore. There were lots of requests to opensource it, and now I am pretty sure that would help.
GIMP has all these features, but its a bit slow and I dont want to use it for these small tasks. Also, XNViewMP is more intuitive, at least after placing the correct buttons in the bar.
I don’t know… I think that Gwenview having a limited number of features and tools is a good thing. It is, after all, a viewer, not an editor. As such, sure, crop, mirror and rotate, resize, and share are useful tools, but I prefer it start up quickly and be light than have it turn into a GIMP or Krita II.
Sometimes you just want to grab an image, crop, it resize, share, bish, bash, bosh, done.
I personally encountered many issues with xnview in a distant past, once of which was recently discussed here, namely thumbnail refreshing ( which after years still isn’t solved). And as mentioned, gwenview is a viewer with some. Pretty much all xnview can do is easily done from servicemenus in dolphin ( the likes of Reimage, for example). For me it’s either a few with a viewer and the lot with an editor like gimp, not an in-between. But if I really had to chose an alternative to gwen, it’d be qimgv, which is better integrated with kde than xnview to begin with. It’s fast and it supports scripts at which point you can add all you like to the task context menu.
There would be not many things that Linux cannot do compared to Windows,
as discussed in another thread one should read the doc files with software and be curious enough to look at thing like the Menu - edit (images) does help.
Gwenview could, in fact, resize and rotate all image formats, including JPEG.
I think that Gwenview actually decodes and reencodes the image at every operation in order to do this (and even if not, is not clear where the operations are done thought some simple metadata editing or by reencoding everything).
In a lossless format such as PNG, a decode and a reencode do not degrade the image quality, even if done thousands of times.
In a JPEG image (and the other lossy formats) these operations if not applied via metadata (in rotation for example), or at the DCT blocks level (for flips and crops), actually lead to a quality loss.
In programs like XNView or jpegtran you could actually do all these operations losslessly on the JPEG file (so, without losing quality, even if applied thousand of times).
Would it be possible one day to add a catch to it. Currently when you open a picture in a folder with thousands of images it has to re catch them every time you open it.
Lets say, you open it look a a picture close it remember you wanted to edit a few more you have to wait for it to load them back in. While you can open the specific image you cant use left or right or mouse back and forward tell its done loading. This can take quite a bit of time depending on the amount of pictures.
