14 DAY TRIAL // In a not so distant future, it's very possible to find a built-in camera in just about any mobile phone, gadget or device. Even nowadays, built-in cameras are widely spread among electronic devices, allowing anyone to take pictures in digital format. And because digital photography frees users from the film processing expense, people are taking more pictures now than ever before, making the digital image format one of the most popular ones. Unsurprisingly, more and more image tools are invading the software market for every operating system, tools that either edit the photos or organize them. Or, in the case of ShowImg, both. But can ShowImg compete with other image tools available for Linux?
ShowImg is a picture viewer for KDE 3 that tries to combine all the useful features that other picture viewers don't have. It also allows you to quickly browse through your images collection using its built-in browser panel or its file list. The file list shows either icons or thumbnails and allows you to choose single pictures for viewing. So basically, ShowImg offers three image browsing modes: list mode, thumbnail mode or one by one.
Images from digital cameras include a significant amount of embedded data in the exchangeable image file format (EXIF). The EXIF data shows the time and date when the picture was taken and also a great deal of information regarding the state of the camera and the camera itself. ShowImg provides easy access to that data and even makes use of it when appropriate. As for supported image formats, ShowImg can read all the popular formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG) and some of the less popular ones (MNG, BMP, TIFF, XPM, XBM, PBM, PGM, PPM).
Many image management tools include various types of image manipulation. ShowImg provides basic manipulation features such as manually rotate and flip as the user desires, as well as using the EXIF data to auto rotate and flip images and can also convert images to black and white. From the View menu, you can set one or more effects that will apply to every image previewed with ShowImg. These effects include remove red eye, gray scale, normalize, equalize, intensify, invert, emboss, swirl, spread, implode and charcoal. When the result using one or more of these effects is satisfying, the edited image can easily be saved on the disk in one of the supported formats or, alternatively, can be exported to an archive on CD/DVD, to Flickr or other remote gallery. Images can also be exported to print wizard or to a generated HTML gallery. Of course, any image can be set as wallpaper.
While browsing through your images collection, the thumbnails can be cached by storing them in ~/.showimg directory so they will be quickly displayed the next time you browse that directory, rather than regenerating them each time. Moreover, each interface panel can be hidden, moved or resized so its main interface will suit your taste, desktop size or any other preferences you may have. ShowImg also offers drag'n'drop support for easy file manipulation within itself and with external programs such as Konqueror.
ShowImg offers additional tools for managing your image collection besides just browsing the file system. Images can be pooled into albums which don't store images, just their names. This function is similar to mp3 playlists used by music players. Albums can be created by selecting a directory in the browser panel with the right click and choosing Create New? and then selecting Album. Later on, images can be added to the album by dragging them from the file list and dropping them in the browser panel. Additional information and description can be added to each image by right clicking it and selecting Image Info. Unfortunately, that info won't be saved in the image itself but in a central text file that resides in each image directory. The text file is called descriptions.txt.
Another interesting feature you'll find in ShowImg is its duplicate files detection tool. This function is found under the Tools menu and can be applied for the selected images, the whole directory or both. Moreover, you can select the search method and the approximate threshold. This process uses a cache folder for images fingerprints to speed-up the analysis of items. There's also a collection of batch processes that enable ShowImg to perform mass actions upon the images from the current directory. This function allows you to easily rename, border, color, convert, filter, compress or resize all images, as well as apply effects to them.
Other ShowImg features include full screen view mode and slideshow function (which can also create a MPEG slideshow using ImageMagick and MjpegTools), mouse wheel support, zip files can be browsed as directories and also, there's an image scanning tool available.
The Good
ShowImg provides easy access to your images collection through its file list and browse panels, allows you to generate images albums, supports most of the image formats and basically combines all the useful features of other image viewers into a single application. It also provides basic image editing and manipulation functions.
The Bad
I don't know if it's because of something miss-configured on my system or it's just the way ShowImg is, but all transparent images viewed with it are erroneously displayed. Either some random effect is applied to them, or they just don't appear. Moreover, an embedded service has been added to image types as default, forcing Konqueror to open images in ShowImg view mode. However, this can be changed from Konqueror's View menu while displaying an image or from the File Associations section in Konqueror configuration window (known types - image, select an image type, go to embedding tab and modify the services preference order).
The Truth
ShowImg tried to gather all the useful functions from other image manipulation tools and get rid of the annoying and useless ones. But unfortunately, what one would consider useful, other would consider useless and vice-versa. That said, none of the image tools currently available can truly be referred to as "complete". However, ShowImg has reached the point where it's "useful" and "definitely worth a try".
Check out some screenshots below:
