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https://github.com/jcupitt/vipsdisp

Tiny libvips / gtk+4 image viewer
https://github.com/jcupitt/vipsdisp

gtk4 image image-viewer libvips

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Tiny libvips / gtk+4 image viewer

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README 

        
# vipsdisp



This program displays an image with libvips and gtk4. This is supposed

to be a slightly useful image viewer. It can display huge (many, many GB)

images quickly and without using much memory. It supports many scientific

and technical image formats, including TIFF, WEBP, JP2K, JXL, AVIF, HEIC, PNG,

JPEG, SVS, MRXS, OpenEXR, GIF, PDF, SVG, FITS, Matlab, NIfTI, Analyze, etc. It

supports pixel types from 1 bit mono to 128-bit double precision complex.



All of the UI can make finding the details of image display in the sourcecode

difficult. See [vipsdisp-tiny](https://github.com/libvips/vipsdisp-tiny) for

a minimal example --- that's a libvips image viewer in about 300 lines of

very commented C.



## Screenshots



It all works, though see the TODO list below.



[![Screenshot](screenshots/overview.png)](screenshots/overview.png)



[![Screenshot](screenshots/visualisation.png)](screenshots/visualisation.png)



[![Screenshot](screenshots/save-as.png)](screenshots/save-as.png)



[![Screenshot](screenshots/animation.png)](screenshots/animation.png)



https://youtu.be/KSoBkO2_HtE



## Install



This program is on flathub, see:



https://flathub.org/apps/org.libvips.vipsdisp



Just click "install", or enter:



```shell

flatpak install flathub org.libvips.vipsdisp

```



## Features



* It supports many scientific and technical image formats, including TIFF,

  WEBP, JP2K, JXL, HEIC, AVIF, PNG, JPEG, SVS, MRXS, OpenEXR, GIF, PDF, SVG,

  FITS, Matlab, NIfTI, Analyze, etc. It supports many numeric pixel types,

  any number of image bands, many colour spaces.



* It doesn't need to keep the whole image in memory. It will only read parts 

  that it needs for display, and it understands most pyramidal image formats.

  This means you can open and view huge images quickly.



* It has threaded, asynchronous display repaint, so pixels are

  computed in the background by a pool of workers. The interface stays live

  even under very heavy load.



* It keeps a sparse pyramid of computed tiles as textures on the GPU. Each 

  frame,

  it computes the set of visible tiles, and then the GPU scales, positions and

  composites just those tiles to the screen. CPU load should be low (except

  for the background workers heh). Hold down i (for "in") or + to do a smooth

  zoom on the cursor. If you press "d" it toggles a debug display mode which

  shows the tiles being computed.



* Select *Display control bar* from the top-right menu and a useful

  set of visualization options appear. It supports four main display modes:

  Toilet roll (sorry), Multipage, Animated, and Pages as Bands.



* In Toilet roll mode, a multi-page image is presented as a tall, thin strip

  of images. In Multipage, you see a single page at a time, with a page-select

  spinner (you can also use the `crtl-<` and `ctrl->` keys to flip pages). In

  animated mode, pages flip automatically on a timeout. In pages-as-bands

  mode, many-page single-band images (eg. OME-TIFF) are presented as a 

  single colour image.



* You can select falsecolour and log-scale filters, useful for many scientific

  images. Scale and offset sliders let you adjust image brightness to see into

  darker areas (useful for HDR and many scientific images).



* Select Save as to write an image. It can write most common formats, and lets

  you set file save options. It can write things like DeepZoom pyramids, PFM,

  OpenEXR, and so on.



* Select Properties (alt-Enter) to see image metadata. It can display large

  amounts of metadata (useful for eg. DICOM) with filtering.



* Use alt-Left and alt-Right to move between the set of images being

  displayed, handy for browsing a directory of images. If you drag or load a

  set of images, it'll flip between the images in the set. If you drag or load

  a single image, it'll flip between all the images in that directory.



* It keeps the most recent three views live, so you can flip between them very

  quickly, and all view settings are preserved. This is handy for comparing

  details on two images.



* `Duplicate window` crtl-D makes a copy of the window, so you can compare two

  images side by side. 



* It supports copy/paste and drag/drop of filenames, sets of filenames, and

  textures. You can paste from the screenshot tool, or drag-drop images from

  your file browser, for example.



* It uses the gtk4 GUI toolkit, so the interface is fast, attractive

  and nicely animated. The image is rendered with the GPU, so display ought to

  be quick.



## Shortcuts



* Cursor keys to scroll around

* Cursor keys plus shift to move by a screen size

* Cursor keys plus ctrl to move to image edges

* Number keys to pick a particular magnification

* Ctrl + number keys to pick a particular zoom out

* 0 for best fit

* d, to toggle debug rendering mode

* i, + / o, - to zoom in and out

* ctrl-< / ctrl->. prev page, next page

* alt-Left / alt-Right. prev image, next image

* Mouse drag to pan

* Mousewheel to zoom

* Mousewheel + shift/ctrl to pan

* ^O replace image

* ^S save image

* ^N new viewer

* ^D duplicate view

* alt-Enter toggle properties

* ^C / ^V copy paste of filenames, lists of filenames and textures

* F11 fullscreen



Additionally, you can drag and drop filenames, lists of filenames and

textures.



## Build from source



```shell

cd vipsdisp

meson setup build --prefix=~/vips

cd build

ninja

ninja install

```



And to run:



```shell

export GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR=/home/john/vips/share/glib-2.0/schemas

vipsdisp ~/pics/k2.jpg

```



## Version bump checklist



Version needs updating in the following places:



- **`CHANGELOG.md`**



- **`meson.build`**



- **`org.libvips.vipsdisp.metainfo.xml`** and some release notes and a date as

  well. Be exttremely careful with date formatting, and include leading zeros

  on the day and month.



- **`org.libvips.vipsdisp.json`** needs the version number as a git tag.



## flatpak



Add the `flathub` repo:



```shell

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists \

  flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

```



Install the gtk4 SDK and runtime:



```shell

flatpak install org.gnome.Sdk//47

flatpak install org.gnome.Platform//47

```



Allow file. Recent security changes to git will cause submodule checkout

to fail inside flatpak. If you get errors like `fatal: transport 'file'

not allowed`, re-enable file transport with:



```shell

git config --global protocol.file.allow always

```



Build and try running it:



```shell

flatpak-builder --force-clean --user --install build-dir org.libvips.vipsdisp.json

flatpak run org.libvips.vipsdisp ~/pics/k2.jpg

```



Force a complete redownload and rebuild (should only rarely be necessary) with:



```shell

rm -rf .flatpak-builder

```



Check the files that are in the flatpak you built with:



```shell

ls build-dir/files

```



Uninstall with:



```shell

flatpak uninstall vipsdisp

```



## Notes on flatpak build process



- niftiio is annoying to build, skip it.



- x265 is annoying to build, skip it



- we skip imagemagick as well, too huge



## Packaging for flathub



Install the appdata checker:



```shell

flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.appstream-glib

flatpak run org.freedesktop.appstream-glib validate org.libvips.vipsdisp.metainfo.xml

```



Also:



```shell

desktop-file-validate org.libvips.vipsdisp.desktop 

```



## Uploading to flathub



Make a PR on:



        https://github.com/flathub/org.libvips.vipsdisp 



then check the build status here:



        https://flathub.org/builds/#/apps/org.libvips.vipsdisp



On success, merge to master.



## Build for Windows



Use the libvips Windows build system:



https://github.com/libvips/build-win64-mxe/tree/master



Clone and run:



```

./build.sh --with-disp all x86_64 shared

```



## TODO



- skip unknown files on next / prev?



    - need to add the test to next-image, not glob, since we can't test the

      whole dir on startup



    - need to use next-image to pick the start image (not always the first)



    - need to *not* do this if only one file specified, eg. `vipsdisp x.txt`



- PDF page change does not change image size if pages vary in size



- ^C during a slow load leaves a file in /tmp, can we improve this?



- batch save?



- pass revalidate down to `new_from_file` on F5



- have a look at the new 4.14 `gtk_print_dialog_new()`



    works and is in branch add-print-dialog, but it needs 4.14, and the new

    print API is still unstable



- allow eg. "vipsdisp x.svg[scale=10]", the load dialog should have a

  "load options" expander



- can we move `new_from_file` into a bg thread? the GUI will pause on huge

  SVGs on zoom change right now



    very difficult with the current structure -- we'd need to separate

    tilesource and tilecache completely, and perhaps link them with signals



- tile read errors:



    $ ./src/vipsdisp ~/pics/ome/LuCa-7color_Scan1.ome.tiff 

    (vipsdisp:110067): VIPS-WARNING **: 18:05:16.244: error in tile 0 x 256: tiff2vips: out of order read -- at line 3328, but line 256 requested



    page 0, subifd 2 and subifd 3 are untiled!!!



    we need to decompress the whole layer before we view :( 



- need to separate page and zoom for ome-tiff, since we have many-page

  subifd pyramids



    - useful for fixing PDF zoom in the way we fixed SVG zoom too



- pages as bands



    $ ./src/vipsdisp ~/pics/ome/LuCa-7color_Scan1.ome.tiff 



    flip to last page, zoom, lots of repaint errors



    maybe join first N pages (while pages same size) in pages as bands 

    mode?



    does not page flip to smaller pages correctly



    reset zoom/scroll on pageflip if the page size changes?



    same for audi r8 pdf page flip I guess?



- info bar:



    - pages as bands ... info bar displays only one band



    - will not display complex numbers correctly ... need to unpack to bands,

      or does getpoint do this already?



- zooming:



    - better pinch zoom support



        we should take the coordinates of the pinch gesture into account



        can test this now I have a multitouch trackpad



    - we could shrink tiles on zoom out (we only expand tiles now)



    - before we can do fancy PDF zooming, we'll need to split page and zoom in

      tile_source_open()



- how should we handle images which include labels, macros, thumbnails?



    - load options? save options? 



    - display images in properties? perhaps a thumbnail? set

      attach-associated?



      appear as eg.:



        openslide.associated.thumbnail    1024x732 uchar, 4 bands, srgb