imv - X11/Wayland Image Viewer

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

The master branch of imv is currently UNSTABLE as it contains the in-progress work for imv v4

Features

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

Example Usage

The following examples are a quick illustration of how you can use imv. For full 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 . "*.png" | imv

Open an image fullscreen

imv -f image.jpeg

Viewing images in a random order

find . "*.png" | shuf | imv

Viewing images from stdin

curl http://somesi.te/img.png | imv -

Advanced use

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

Deleting unwanted images

In your imv config:

[binds]
<Shift+X> = exec rm "$imv_current_file"; close

Then press 'X' within imv to delete the image and close it.

Rotate an image

In your imv config:

[binds]
<Shift+R> = exec mogrify -rotate 90 "$imv_current_file"

Then press 'R' within imv to rotate the image 90 degrees using imagemagick.

Tag images from imv using dmenu as a prompt

In your imv config:

[binds]
u = exec echo $imv_current_file >> ~/tags/$(ls ~/tags | dmenu -p "tag")

Then press 'u' within imv to tag the current image.

Viewing 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

Installation

Dependencies

Library	Version	Notes
pthreads		Required.
xkbcommon		Required.
pangocairo		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.
FreeImage		Optional. Provides PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, etc.
libtiff		Optional. Provides TIFF support.
libpng		Optional. Provides PNG support.
libjpeg		Optional. Provides JPEG support.
librsvg	>=v2.44	Optional. Provides SVG 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 and control which ones imv is built with in config.mk

$ $EDITOR config.mk
$ make
# make install

Macro PREFIX controls installation prefix. If more control over installation paths is required, macros BINPREFIX, MANPREFIX and DATAPREFIX are available. Eg. to install imv to home directory, run:

$ BINPREFIX=~/bin PREFIX=~/.local make install

In case something goes wrong during installation process you may use verbose mode to inspect commands issued by make:

$ V=1 make

Tests

imv has an almost non-existent test suite. The test suite requires cmocka.

$ make check

License

imv's source is published under the MIT license.