Photo Metadata

Oculante – hardware-accelerated image viewer

Last Updated on June 10, 2026

In Operation

Here’s an image of Oculante in action. The software offers hardware acceleration. We tested with systems with both a mid-range dedicated graphics card and onboard graphics. The image viewer is fast without a good quality dedicated graphics card. And the software’s caching helps to make reloading extremely quick.

Oculante in action
Click image for full size

There’s a good range of image formats supported.

The software lets you pick pixels, display location and color values by clicking the image info icon.

Image information
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There’s image editing available. We can apply a wide variety of filters: Brightness, contrast, exposure, desaturate, apply color LUT, equalize, scale image min max, posterize, channel copy, rotate, HSV, perspective crop, mult color, fill color, blur, 3×3 filter, gradient map, multiply with alpha, divide by alpha, expression, noise, add color, resize, invert, flip, and color fringe. There’s also lossless JPEG transforms, and a paint mode to boot.

Image editing
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There’s some useful customization options.

Preferences dialog box

Summary

Oculante is a competent image viewer with basic image editing.

We’re not convinced the hardware-acceleration makes a significant difference for this type of program.

Oculante coped well with a wide range of image formats we tested, but a few of our JPG images failed to display with the error “TurboJPEG error: Could not determine subsampling level of JPEG image”.

Website: github.com/woelper/oculante
Support:
Developer: Johann Woelper
License: MIT License

Oculante is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary


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