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...and am still very satisfied, especially the ability to open files immediately fullscreen is nice.

Also it's very fast when browsing a directory, no delays at all.

The only problem I have with it is that it does not support animated gifs, but that's not really important anwyay.

Thanks for giving it a short article here, hopefully more people will try feh.

EDIT: development seems quite slow currently, hopefully it goes on.

Edited 2006-07-31 22:38

feh is an awesome program. It does what it is supposed to do and it does it fast. feh is one of those addictive little programs. You don't notice how much you like it until you are trying to use a system that does not have it installed.

Nothing beats it. I think it, not type it.
feh -F -Z hello.png

I use it for slideshows during company demos:
feh -D 25 -F -Z *.jpg

I used it to drive an 8k x 2k resolution display array once...it even detects when the file on disk changes.

i have always used gqview - it's fast, and has useful and quick keyboard/mouse options ... easy to scale to screen, scale up/down, rotate, scroll your mouse wheel to move through directory and so on ...

I have yet to find an open source image viewer that can replace irfanview on windows. It's fairly absurd how much I can do with it compared to how small it is -_-;;

feh sounds neat and has it's place though, and will definitely be downloaded tonight.

It's very fast, but unfortunately it's very buggy, especially considering how few features it actually has. Even some of the most basic features, like showing a complete image in a window, don't work. My 1-minute test with it showed the following:

- Middle-mousebutton zooming is cumbersome since it resets every time you start zooming.

- Numpad +/- zooming doesn't interpolate and often causes the image to disappear from the view. (E.g., try to zoom in with middle mouse button and then use numpad + and/or -.)

- Fullscreen is not fullscreen at all (e.g., the gnome taskbar and panels are still visible).

- It doesn't understand fullscreen with multiple monitors (on the same X display). With my setup feh thinks fullscreen means as high as one of my monitors and as wide as both of them together, causing half of the image to be hidden to the right of my first monitor and above my second monitor.

- It doesn't even seem to understand windowed mode with multiple monitors. It tries to resize the window to outside the viewable areas (although the window manager clips the window size to the bounds of the monitor it's on). This bug can be circumvented by switching on the "Freeze Window Size" option, but that has its own implications.

Simply put, it's completely unusable, at least for me, so I'll stick to GQview.

http://www.klografx.net/qiv/index2.html

another quick and small image viewer, I've found it pretty decent for when I'm not using KDE and am instead in something minimalistic like wmii and need to look at some image or other, without loading up all the foo from the K-world which something like kview would entail.

Quite nice! I like how feh automatically saves the file when you press > or < to rotate it, saving an extra step.

However, I always run jhead to autorotate all my pictures after downloading from my camera. Ie:

$ jhead -autorot *.jpg

(jhead available in Ubuntu universe.)

ACDSee 3.1 is what I have used for years and probably will continue to use. One of the worst must be Eye of Gnome. No features, annoying behavior and very slow.

What do you mean all linux image viewers have annoyances? kuickshow is perfect for me. What is annoying is that I can't find a decent image viewer for OSX.

Preview has two problems:
1) It doesn't resize the window when moving from a landscape to a portrait image, so one of them is always shown much smaller than it needs to be. It also doesn't resize properrly when images are of different sizes.

2) No hot key to move to the previous/next image in the directory. The workaround is to select all the images and load them all into preview, which is a retarded and impractical solution.

Tried http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19978 yet?
haha, i was about to suggest xee... i know the author of it.

i usually use gwenview, which is a little slow, but it's the only image viewer for *nix that i've found that has the features i want (real full screen mode, animated gif support).

f-spot is definatly the way to go when using gnome.. verry fast startup/rendering time and all the features you want: export to flickr, gallery, exif stuff, tagging, comments, basic image editing etc..

http://f-spot.org/Main_Page

I used older versions of ACDsee for years, but I've since switched to a Mac and can't stand that we don't have a good photo browsing program. I hate dragging photos into preview, and ACDsee stopped making new versions. I also can't stand "photo organization" programs. I want to efficiently maintain my photos in folders, and sometimes I get a cd from someone and I don't want them imported into a library of photos just so I can look at them.

gThumb was always my favorite on Linux, and I built it with fink and use it on the Mac. I would settle for some simple programs, but many that are available don't move through directories within the program; they only browse the current directory which is next to useless to me.

http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/

Another very lightweight, quick image viewier is qiv. This has a feature where you can assign a key to an external script. I use this to sort pictures. I have the "1" key move the file into a "sorted" directory, so I can scroll through and hit "1" on anything I want to save. I also use this to generate thumbnails, and sometimes to scp the picture to a site.

qiv doesn't even have menus. It just does one thing, very quickly - it displays images. And fullscreen mode really is fullscreen. This isn't a good program for manipulating images but it is good for sorting them, owing to its considerable speed, especially on my system.

I'm looking at feh now, having just emerged it. It's about as fast as qiv, but as was mentioned, the fullscreen isn't true fullscreen. qiv, on the other hand, does this properly, so that's one plus for qiv. As for the rest of the feature set, I'll have to compare.

There is also a quite tiny and neat edisplay of exact-image:

http://exactcode.de/oss/exact-image

It utilizes Enlightenment 17's Evas do perform it's rendering tasks.

after trying several other "fast" image viewers, i retract my earlier statement about gwenview being slow.