KDE 4: Gwenview

The default KDE image viewer has received quite some love from developers. The interface has change a lot, making it less cluttered, and there have been add some new little features.

View modes

Gwenview in KDE 3.x when opening an image used to show more information than what you actually wanted, so now when you launch it trough clicking the file in Dolphin/Konqueror it'll open just with the toolbar and the photo, nothing more, no sidebars, no anything. Screenshot of course:


That view mode you saw, is the "View" without the Information Sidebar.

Simple, right? But if you open Gwenview directly you'll get a different look, with far more data and options, incluiding a nice preview and Information sidebars. Screenshot:


The Dolphin kpart for Gwenview is simply amazing, it's beautiful, the little bar under it allow you to change the size of folders and preview, but it does it like iPhoto, totally animated.

Then, there it's the Browse view, which is essentially, the preview sidebar without the big view image part, mandatory screenshot:


And there is even more, if you hover a file it will give some nifty options, look:


It aloud you to see the image fullscreen, rotate it clock wise and inverse.

And there are even more improvements. What if I rotated an image or modified it?
That's what you'll get, a simple non-intrusive notification:


And, not being good enough, the images that have been modified get a little save button under them, always visible, and inclueded in the hover mini options too:


If you go into fullscreen mode and move your mouse to the top, you'll get this little nice looking pop-up with basic options:


Print Dialog, Extra Features and Configuration Dialog

Gwenview has the same dialog Okular has:


What if you want to save a part of an image as a new one? Easy, you just need to use the crop feauture under edit menu. You can easily use your mouse, or use coordinates.


You can resize images too, with a simple, still useful dialog, under edit too:


And, at last, the simple, almost empty, configuration dialog...:


Hey, wait, in those two last screenshots, the windows behind got darker. Why?! We'll get to that eventually :P

Once again we had come to an end, I hope you enjoyed it :)

See you next time covering: GAMES.

8 comments:

Jeremy said...

I am quite happy on how KDE is focusing more on simplicity. I mean, Opening up images in view mode was just genius. LoL.

Thanks, Can't wait for games. I love the KMahjongg(Or how its spelled) game.

kedadi said...

"Hey, wait, in those two last screenshots, the windows behind got darker. Why?! We'll get to that eventually :P"

it's because of compositing, and i really liked it, wish it could be implemented on non-compositing environments (with color schemes)

Unknown said...

@kedadi: we can already do that with Qt4 but then that forces entire windows to repaint themselves which, for many applications, is very expensive. horrifically so, even.

hopefully in future versions of Qt we can get the amount of repainting under control when there are small hinting changes, but with full window changes such as in these screenshots it would still require a *lot* of painting not matter what we do in Qt.

so until we get to that next generation of CPUs with an exponential bump in speed/power we'll have to live with compositing.

of course ... by that point compositing will be available on every single piece of hardware out there, even the lowest of the low end.

the EEE PC runs sweet and smooth with kwin4's compositing, and that's today's hardware with a rather new compositing system in kwin.

iow, by the time colour scheme changes are cheap enough it won't matter anymore ;)

Luis Augusto said...

WOW, this is freaking cool, Aaron reads my blog XD

Let me alone! I'm just a little kid dreaming because of Christmas :P

And, sorry for the delay with GAMES, I was on Cozumel (a paradisaic Caribbean Island), It may be ready tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow in the worst possible scenario.

Unknown said...

Woow! Gwenview is my favorite graphic viewer, but I'm taking Gnomein the meanwhile KDE4 becomes robust... I hope would be soon, because there are a lot of improvements, like these you're explaining to us, thank you very much!

Anonymous said...

i just miss tree view...

samuel said...

I just discovered Gwenview, on Ubuntu. Its the perfect acdsee replacement that i've been dying for since forever and a day. But the version is 1.4.2, and i fear i'm far behind?
Are the screenshots, and the other anon above, correct that the newer versions no longer have the treeview/mass-nested-folder-browsing ability?

Anonymous said...

The newer gwenview does not crash constantly as the old one, but I don't like the fact that you can't have a file list (no thumbnails) alongside the viewing, like used to be possible in gwenview, kde3's konqueror with kipi plugins or something (used to be more reliable and flexible than gwenview itself), and still is with geeqie (the new gqview).