Lightning Image Viewer – fast and lightweight desktop image viewer

Images are part of every day internet usage, and are particularly important for social media engagement. A good image viewer is an essential part of any operating system.

There are so many image viewers available for Linux. Some would argue too many. But many of them offer something different. For example, I personally mostly use Geeqie, not because it’s got the best UI or feature set. It stands out for me courtesy of a really useful function where changes to an image are automatically displayed by the program without any human intervention. That’s really useful when I generate charts generated with R.

Lightning Image Viewer (LIV) is billed as a desktop image (previewer) with some notable UX features. This is free and open source software written in Rust.

Installation

I evaluated LIV using Manjaro, an Arch-based Linux distribution. Arch is famous for the Arch User Repository (AUR), a community-driven repository. It contains package descriptions (PKGBUILDs) that allow users to compile a package from source with makepkg and then install it via the in-house pacman, a lightweight, simple and fast package manager that allows for continuously upgrading the entire system with one command.

There’s a couple of packages in the AUR. I installed the binary package with Pamac (Manjaro’s GUI package manager).

The project provides a .deb package for Debian/Ubuntu, and there’s also a Windows binary if you’re still dabbling in the occult.

In Operation

LIV is very different to your typical image viewer. The program doesn’t have a menu interface at all. Open an image from a file manager, and you’ll see the image displayed without any menu, and the only window decoration is a small semi-transparent grey border. .

While there’s no menu interface, you can use the mouse or keyboard to zoom in and out, as well as pan around the image. You can make the image full screen by pressing the F key or F11, or with a  mouse wheel click. And you can play animations with the space bar.

It’s also possible to navigate between images in the same directory using using Page Up and Page Down. Keyboard shortcuts also let you rotate and mirror images.

It’s also possible to open files from the command-line but the developer intends images to be opened from a file manager.

Summary

LIV is pretty light on features but it may be all that you need. It’s a decent previewer for images and supports a wide range of formats.

LIV has a strange bug where images don’t display in KDE Plasma depending on the wallpaper chosen for the desktop I tested the software on multiple machines and each exhibited the same problem.

Website: github.com/shatsky/lightning-image-viewer
Support:
Developer: Eugene Shatsky
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Lightning Image Viewer is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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