imv - X11/Wayland Image Viewer

imv is a command line image viewer intended for use with tiling window managers.

Project home

Features

• Native Wayland and X11 support
• Support for dozens of image formats including:
  • PNG
  • JPEG
  • Animated GIFs
  • SVG
  • TIFF
  • Various RAW formats
  • Photoshop PSD files
• Configurable key bindings and behaviour
• Highly scriptable with IPC via imv-msg

Packages

Example Usage

The following examples are a quick illustration of how you can use imv. For detailed documentation see the man page.

# Opening images
imv image1.png another_image.jpeg a_directory

# Opening a directory recursively
imv -r Photos

# Opening images via stdin
find . -type f -name "*.svg" | imv

# Open an image fullscreen
imv -f image.jpeg

# Viewing images in a random order
find . -type f -name "*.png" | shuf | imv

# Viewing images from stdin
curl http://somesi.te/img.png | imv -

# Viewing multiple images from the web
curl -Osw '%{filename_effective}\n' 'http://www.example.com/[1-10].jpg' | imv

Slideshow

imv can be used to display slideshows. You can set the number of seconds to show each image for with the -t option at start up, or you can configure it at runtime using the t and T hotkeys to increase and decrease the image display time, respectively.

To cycle through a folder of pictures, showing each one for 10 seconds:

imv -t 10 ~/Pictures/London

Custom configuration

imv's key bindings can be customised to trigger custom behaviour:

[binds]

# Delete and then close an open image by pressing 'X'
<Shift+X> = exec rm "$imv_current_file"; close

# Rotate the currently open image by 90 degrees by pressing 'R'
<Shift+R> = exec mogrify -rotate 90 "$imv_current_file"

# Use dmenu as a prompt for tagging the current image
u = exec echo "$imv_current_file" >> ~/tags/$(ls ~/tags | dmenu -p "tag")

Scripting

With the default bindings, imv can be used to select images in a pipeline by using the p hotkey to print the current image's path to stdout. The -l flag can also be used to tell imv to list the remaining paths on exit for a "open set of images, close unwanted ones with x, then quit imv to pass the remaining images through" workflow.

Key bindings can be customised to run arbitrary shell commands. Environment variables are exported to expose imv's state to scripts run by it. These scripts can in turn modify imv's behaviour by invoking imv-msg with $imv_pid.

For example:

#!/usr/bin/bash
imv "$@" &
imv_pid = $!

while true; do
  # Some custom logic
  # ...

  # Close all open files
  imv-msg $imv_pid close all
  # Open some new files
  imv-msg $imv_pid open ~/new_path

  # Run another script against the currently open file
  imv-msg $imv_pid exec another-script.sh '$imv_current_file'
done

Installation

Dependencies

Library	Version	Notes
pthreads		Required.
xkbcommon		Required.
pangocairo		Required.
icu		Required.
X11		Optional. Required for X11 support.
GLU		Optional. Required for X11 support.
xcb		Optional. Required for X11 support.
xkbcommon-x11		Optional. Required for X11 support.
wayland-client		Optional. Required for Wayland support.
wayland-egl		Optional. Required for Wayland support.
EGL		Optional. Required for Wayland support.
FreeImage		Optional. Provides PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, etc.
libtiff		Optional. Provides TIFF support.
libpng		Optional. Provides PNG support.
libjpeg-turbo		Optional. Provides JPEG support.
librsvg	>=v2.44	Optional. Provides SVG support.
libnsgif		Optional. Provides animated GIF support.
libheif		Optional. Provides HEIF support.

Dependencies are determined by which backends and window systems are enabled when building imv. You can find a summary of which backends are available in meson_options.txt

$ meson build/
$ ninja -C build/
# ninja -C build/ install

--prefix controls installation prefix. If more control over installation paths is required, --bindir, --mandir and --datadir are available. Eg. to install imv to home directory, run:

$ meson --bindir=~/bin --prefix=~/.local

License

imv's source is published under the terms of the MIT license.