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##QPhotoView
QPhotoView is an image viewer for photographers. It first and foremost meant as a tool to be used by photographers -- for viewing photos, for comparing different shots of the same scene, for sorting out which shots to keep and which ones to throw away, for opening them in some dedicated image processing software such as Gimp or PhotoShop, and of course for presenting them to people.
It is explicitly not meant as a one-size-fits all do-everything viewer, much less as an image manipulation tool. There are other tools that try that, and each of them fails misearably at it in one way or the other (see below: Why yet another image viewer?).
https://github.com/shundhammer/qphotoview/blob/master/doc/qphotoview-screenshot.png
This software is licensed under the GPL (the GNU Public License) version 2 -- see also file COPYING.
qmake
make
make install (as root)
You neeed a working C++ compiler environment and Qt 4.6 or later. On most Linux distributions, you will have to install the -devel (openSUSE) or -dev (Debian/Ubuntu) packages for Qt which include the header files and development tools like "qmake" and "moc".
Please make sure you can compile and run simple "Hello, world" type Qt programs before contacting us because of build problems.
If you don't have libexiv2 (and its header files) installed, you can build and install it from the 3rdparty/ directory. See build instructions there. By default, QPhotoView wants to link it from /usr/local/lib, but you can change that in the src/src.pro qmake file.
Short version: Because the other ones (at least the ones that are available on Linux / X11) all suck. They all suck in different ways, but they definitely all suck.
The only one that sucked a lot less (kuickshow) than all the others went out of active development a long time ago, and it will go out of maintenance in the near future.
Details:
KDE's Gwenview is what comes closest, but it sucks in very subtle ways. While recent versions (as of mid-2010) at least display images quick enough to enable comparing them, it still leaves much to be desired. Its metadata display is, just like ALL other viewers, just horrible. I really don't give a shit about the JPEG compression algorithm used or other useless crap the EXIF data contain. But I do need the exposure time, the aperture, ISO speed, focal length, and maybe what lens was used. Is there any way to display this in Gwenview (and not all that other stuff)? I don't think so. If it's there, it is very well hidden. Also, deleting the current image is an operation that is (at least in the default configuration) unreasonably difficult. Hell, when I just imported images from my camera and I see one that is out of focus, I want to get rid of it quickly -- hit [Delete] or [D] (or whatever) and good-bye.
KDE's digiKam is an attempt of a one-tool-does-everything program. It insists on managing all images in its (MySQL or whatever) data base which is not what I want: I have FILES. I want to be able to rsync them to my USB hard drive, to my home NAS, to some other machine. I do not want to depend on somebody else's idea of what an image data base should look like. I also don't want its gazillion of image processing plug-ins for red eye correction and whatever. Maybe they are what some people want, but I want to stick with my favourite image processing software (Gimp for want of something better on the Linux / X11 platform). It is overloaded with features I don't want, but it lacks most of the features I do want -- like rapidly displaying all files of a given directory in sequence, deleting individual ones, or displaying the meta data that are relevant (!) for photography.
GNOME's F-Spot is a Mono-driven program. Too bad it wants to taint my machine with something as evil as Mono. Maybe F-Spot is great, but I will never know it since it wants me to install that Mono resource hog -- which is not going to happen. Anyway, it's GNOME which means Gtk look and feel which reminds me of the early 1990s. Plus, I don't like the GNOME people's ideas of usability.
'xv' was great at its days. But those days (the early 1990s) are long past. Today, it's just a crude leftover of days gone by. Plus, what were they thinking with the way it keeps distorting image proportions? Hell, the only thing NOBODY ever wants in an image viewer is changing the width/height aspect ratio. This was insane even back in the 1990s, but even more insane is the fact that this was kept like this during all that time.
Patches are welcome. But everybody who wishes to contribute please keep the above design goals in mind: This is meant as a tool for photographers. It is not a generic viewer for everything. It is not an image manipulation program. It is not, does not want to be and will never be a substitute for Gimp or for PhotoShop.
Please stick to the coding conventions used in the rest of the code, in particular braces (new line for opening brace, not added to the previous line), indentation (4 blanks) and tab width (1 tab is 8 blanks). If in doubt, look at how existing code in the project does it.
Life is too short for wasting time with fixing somebody else's broken coding style; I've done way too much of that in my life already.
Please DO NOT copy and paste the complete GPL or other confusing legalese blurb into the header of each file. One or two lines stating that it's GPL'ed and a reference to the COPYING file is plenty, and it does not distract others from the real code.
On the other hand, please DO write one or two lines near the top of the file explaining what the declarations (in the case of header files) or the code does. This helps tremendously for getting one's bearings while browsing through the code.
Stefan Hundhammer [email protected]