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Fast Loading Image Viewer for Ubuntu Linux: Mirage

These days when it comes to image viewers, GNU/Linux has a whole bunch of very competitive ones + if you use Ubuntu, then it comes with an excellent, fully featured image viewer (and a simple editor included) called Shotwell which was so good that it replaced the previous contender F-Spot.

There's certainly nothing wrong with Shotwell... but if you're searching for something loads a bit faster but doesn't come with a lot of features (don't be fooled, it's quite powerful!) then Mirage is a pretty good one.

But before we go further along this road ;-), just remember, if you have a huge list of albums to manage, then this is not the one to go for.

Main features...

*. Uses the GTK+ toolkit that integrates flawlessly with the Ubuntu Unity, Gnome classic desktop and other GTK+ based ones such as LXDE & Xfce (heck, you can even use it under Qt/KDE as well). .


*. Supports a lot of file types (including both raster and vector graphics) such as: png, jpg, svg, xpm, gif, bmp, tiff and many others.

*. Zoom/Out, Flip and Rotate, Full screen and a small thumbnail window to the left, etc. 

*. It may be a simple app yet you can do basic image editing such as : Cropping, Resizing and color changing too.


*. View image properties.

*. Save in different formats.


*. Take screenshots.

*. Rename, Delete pictures.

*. Image pre-loading (which helps to reduce the loading times).

*. Slide-show support.

*. Change between image scaling algorithms.

*. Change thumbnail size and background colors... man, so much for "simplicity" :P.


You can install Mirage in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 11.10, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the below command in your Terminal window.
sudo apt-get install mirage

But remember, unlike with Shotwell or F-Shot, etc Mirage is not built to let you easily handle lots of image libraries (because that's not its purpose). Yet, all you want is a fast loading, pretty simple image viewer that has some useful features, then Mirage is a pretty good looking app nonetheless.

2 comments:

  1. How does Mirage compare to gThumb? Is it lighter, faster, better...?

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  2. @Anonymous,

    Well, I think gThumb is better when concerning that it's more than an Image viewer since it's also an image organizer as well (you know you can categorize things, etc).

    As I mentioned in the post, this is a image viewer (with some decent editing ability, etc).

    And I haven't been using it lately and not sure whether it'll be faster than Mirage... but again, it's designed for a more broader usage, I think :)...

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