Now that KDE 4.8 has been released, it’s time to recap all changes you will find in Gwenview.
The main change is the addition of animations when viewing images: crossfading between images and nicer-to-use comparisons. You can learn more from this previous blog article.
This change was not nice for users of some graphic cards whose OpenGL drivers do not support what Gwenview tries to do. I decided to play it safe for now: animations in Gwenview now use software rendering by default. For better performance, you can enable OpenGL rendering in the configuration dialog.
This new version of Gwenview also comes with a lot of smaller changes, some of them caused by the limitations which were introduced by the new animation system.
Scrolling and Zooming
- No more scrollbars: A bird-eye view lets you scroll the image.
- Nicer zoom cursor. I realized Qt now supports truecolor cursors, so I drew a nicer magnifying glass cursor instead of the black+white+1bit-alpha-channel version. Holding down Ctrl to zoom won’t bring you back to the 90s anymore!
- Pressing ‘F’ toggles zoom-to-fit on and off.
- More consistent behavior: SVG images can now be scrolled using the same shortcuts as scrolling raster images.
Global User interface changes
- The “sidebar collapser”, the little arrow on the left of the view which let you hide the sidebar is gone. It has been replaced by a button in the statusbar.
- Labels for some of the toolbar buttons have been removed, reducing its width. It should now be more usable on small netbook-like screens.
Tools
- The red-eye reduction and crop tools no longer show floating widgets over the image, a thin bar slides from the bottom of the window instead.
Behavior
- Compared images follow thumbnail view order: previously when one selected two or more images to compare them, they would not necessarily appear in the same order as in the thumbnail bar.
- Arrow-key navigation in zoom-to-fit mode. This one has been requested by quite a few people. When an image is in zoom-to-fit mode, you can go to the previous and next image with the arrow keys. When you zoom in, arrow keys are used to scroll the image. This is very similar to the behavior provided by phones or digital cameras.
Video support
- The on-screen-display is now transparent.
- One can use the left and right arrow keys to seek
- A late addition: an undocumented shortcut (P) to toggle playback
- Note that video support is a bit fishy right now: it seems Phonon does not always play well with its video widget being embedded in a QGraphicsView, known symptoms are wrong colors or wrong aspect ratio. Hopefully this will improve in the next releases.
4.8.1 should bring you its usual series of bug fixes, among them is generating thumbnails for all images of the current folder, not only the currently visible ones. This fix is a bit bigger than usual *.1 fixes, so testers are welcome: the code lives in Gwenview git repository, in the “gen-all-thumbnails” branch.
I hope you enjoy this new Gwenview!
Advertisement
Like this:
One blogger likes this post.
identi.ca
Wrong colors in QGV are fixed in recent version of Phonon GStreamer.
And as far as I remember I’ve never encountered wrong aspect ratio…
Thanks for this post. Usually around a new release I read a lot about the subsequent, current developed release. This post make me looking forward to 4.8, not 4.9
really liking many of the changes in gwenview for 4.8
)
one thing that i noticed that might be nice is to hide the birdseye view when there is no panning possible. it looks rather odd when the whole image fits in the window
If it is still showing, then that’s a bug. It is not supposed to. How do you manage to trigger this?
Well, it is just enough to have a picture that is smaller than the screen, i.e. that fits without shrinking it and then just switching from “Fit” to “100%”, then the birdeye view will show up although the entire picture fits on the screen
Thanks, going to look into that.
Using this version of gwenview is truely a joy!
I mostly run in maximized state, and it is obvious that a small left margin in the sidebar views would be an improvement.
Thanks for all those wonderful improvements
Thank for the post!
A small wish for this point:
>More consistent behavior: SVG images can now be scrolled using the same shortcuts as >scrolling raster images.
Could be scaling of svg made more consistent (e.g. scale as vector image not as raster, bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=286099). Or it is fixed in 4.8.1?
I haven’t looked into it. It’s true that it looks weird. Should dive into how Qt renders SVG to fix this.
While the additional feature are certainly nice, wouldn’t colour management support be a much more important? On a wide gamut screen, bird-eye view doesn’t help much when the colours are wrong.
And it’s implemented in digikam or showfoto (latter not as nice as gwenview to just browse some pics) so a similar approach could be done here…
Of course, in the end, the one who invests the time decides what to do…
It is indeed a feature quite a few people have requested. Problem is I don’t need for it personally so I haven’t felt the urge to work on this.
What’s new? Gwenview can’t open psd files anymore…
Something weird is indeed happening with psd: I can open them with my local build of KDE but not with the distro packages.
I can open it with distro package (Arch), but only for example with KuickShow or Okular.
Great work. It is always a pleasure to work with gwenview. Thank you!
Actually zoom tool need a lot of work!
1) Ctrl+scrolling is ok, is default on many apps but ctr click to zoom? ctrl+rightclick is even worse! I was so lost with this new zooming. Make proper zoom tool accessible from main toolbar with some hot-key (preferably “Z” key), make proper hand tool also. Enabling zoom tool will change cursor to magnifying glass with “+”, make it possible to drag and select area of zooming (now if clicked it just popping zoom – and I don’t know whats going on anymore), make right click menu “fit to screen”, “original size” etc. alt key will change “+” to “-”, look at good old photoshop zooming enough said
2) ctrl+click+movement = zoom + draging while showing zoom cursor = I think it’s bug
3) if I zoom in a lot of times I need to click equal amount to zoom out (on fullscreen), top autohide menu doesn’t have zoom slider either. Just look at point 1)
Is it possible to choose speed of crossfade effect? is it following “animation speed” of effects in system settings? This is a mess too, a) should be configurable to choose speed either in gwenview or follow kwin effects
1) Ctrl+left/right click has been there since Gwenview 1. It’s hardly new.
I don’t want to have “proper” zoom and hand tools to Gwenview: it adds too many modes.
2) That is indeed strange. Will fix.
“3) if I zoom in a lot of times I need to click equal amount to zoom out (on fullscreen), top autohide menu doesn’t have zoom slider either. Just look at point 1)”
=> I don’t understand.
“Is it possible to choose speed of crossfade effect? is it following “animation speed” of effects in system settings? This is a mess too, a) should be configurable to choose speed either in gwenview or follow kwin effects”
No it is not configurable.
All in all, thank you for your positive tone. Not.
Thanks for the updates and explanations of the various changes.
I came here because I noticed wrong (shifted) colours in video playback, OK you’re aware of it and where to look.
Thanks again!
This update took me by surprise. I work with large photos of census images, and it’s convenient for me to have the mouse over the lower scrollbar and just reach over and scroll to move from left to right without losing my focus on another application I’m transcribing data in. Are there any plans to re-implement mouse-wheel scrolling without the scroll bars? (Maybe shift+scroll for side-to-side scrolling?) Not intending this as a feature request, but rather just curious as to whether it’s being considered. For my census transcribing, I’ll probably just adjust to alt-tab, arrow key, alt-tab back. Not a big deal there.
What I’m really wonder is whether there will be a way to visually remove the “bird-eye view” square. Should I submit a bug requesting an option to disable this?
Hopefully I don’t sound like I’m complaining. I absolutely love Gwenview, and the removal of scrollbars I feel is a very strong visual improvement when viewing images larger than the screen.
Mouse wheel scrolling is back in 4.8.1, not sure how I managed to miss this! I have no plan to add an option to hide the bird-eye view for now: it is the only way to know where you are in the image, now that the scrollbars are gone.
>>it is the only way to know where you are in the image, now that the scrollbars are gone.
Bird-eye view could appear on LPM+mousemove, for example.
Btw. I’m curious about these bugs/regressions. Any info/eta about that?
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291759
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=292635
Best regards.
> Bird-eye view could appear on LPM+mousemove, for example.
What do you mean with LPM? I was thinking about having it autohide when the mouse is not moving, which may be what you mean.
> Btw. I’m curious about these bugs/regressions. Any info/eta about that?
No eta on those bugs. I can’t commit to any date for Gwenview work, but I will have a look.
Silly me, LPM (in Polish) = LMB (left mouse button), sorry about that.
>> I was thinking about having it autohide when the mouse is not moving, which may be what you mean.
Indeed, bird-eye view isn’t just indicator, so mouse button is redundant.
>> [...] but I will have a look.
Thank you.
I had a bug with the Gnome image viewer that gave wrong colors for photos. No such bugs here. The OpenGL option works with Intel integrated graphics on my computer as well. A very good job.
Pingback: Aurélien Gâteau: What’s new in Gwenview from KDE 4.8 | txwikinger-ubuntu | Scoop.it
Updated today to 4.8, and found a not jet mentioned problem: sometimes the bird-eye view is too small to grab (at the size of an pixel),
see the screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dLpD0.png
Possible solution: min width/high and max width/high and scale in between.
I can open a new bug report if it is necessary.
Hi, just upgraded Gwenview to 4.8.0 today. There is one negative change compared to the previous version:
1. Open an image – opens in fit-to-window mode
2. Switch to 1:1 mode (F key or middle mouse button)
3. Move to the next image (with space or mouse wheel)
Expected behaviour: the new image should open in 1:1 mode.
What happens: the new image opens in fit-to-window mode.
I didn’t find any settings to change that. In 4.7.4 the view mode was preserved while walking through images, in 4.8.0 the next image always opens in fit-to-window mode.
Sticking with 4.7.4 for now…
Thanks anyway for all the good work!
Indeed, that’s a known bug. Will see if I can get it fixed for 4.8.x.
There is problem on widescreen pictures like 2560×1280 or taller. Gwenview does not show them. Is there a memory problem? It runs inside one vm and only got 2gb for use. Okular views the pictures ok. And it is ok as kde backdrop.
That is very strange: I just create a picture of 2560×1280 and it is correctly displayed by Gwenview. Can you file a bug report about this and attach a picture which fails to load to it?
uploaded one desktop backdrop for Gwenview by here: http://imageshack.us/f/703/backdropx.png
that will not show up with Gwenview but works for kde backdrop.
Thanx for your reply.
I just looked at it. It seems Gwenview is confused by the fact it is a jpeg file with a .png extension. I will look into this.
Mmm no, now it works. I am confused. Maybe ImageShack did something to your image. Best would be sending it to me via mail (see “about” page).
Tried to sent to you but received it back. Mail server complains on quota exceeded.
Zoom icon goes to http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/5017/backdropx.png That is original image, in png not jpg. You can wget it.
Kde forum is talking over a bug at images in 2560 screen size when running on vm. They will not show at all. I will try to refind it.
Thanx for your reply and for making Gwenview!
I think scrollbars should be optional. As has been mentioned, they can be useful. For one thing, they allow one to see where the view is in relation to the image without obscuring the image–but the birds-eye obscures the image.
I had to drop scrollbars because of the switch to QGraphicsView. I think an autohiding bird-eye view should help knowing where you are in the image without obscuring it.