Being a fluxbox user I have been looking for some lightweight imageviewer. xloadimage can always be invoked from CLI whenever needed. While helping a friend build up a XFCE based gentoo system we discovered mirage. Mirage needs only pyGTK installed, which should be available on most linux distributions these days. Some of the useful features of mirage are :-
Lightweight
Easy to use interface
Small app coded in python and GTK+
Supports various image formats like png, svg, jpeg, gif, etc.
Shows thumnails of all images in current directory
Displays basic information about size, resolution and compression of images in the status bar at the bottom
Supports basic editing features like rotate, flip, crop, resize, saturation,
It can also show images in the current directory as a slide show.
Option for viewing remote images
It can also take screenshots and save it in png format
Here’s a screenshot of mirage taken in mirage itself
Mirage image from Mirage
More can be found on Mirage’s website It has 4 modes for opening a file –
Smart Mode,
Zoom to Fit Mode,
1:1 Fit Mode and
Last Active Mode.
Here’s the definition of smart mode, from mirage’s website
Smart Mode uses 1:1 zooming if the image is smaller than the available space and Fit Mode if the image is larger.
It also supports command line arguments, though they may not be utilized too much. Nonetheless it is available if needed.
Now, I have left it’s best part to the last. It supports custom actions eg. pressing ctrl +e opens the image in gimp, alt + t to create thumbnail of the image and so on. All these can be easily changed too by editing it’s values in Edit=> Custom Actions=> Configure. You can also add new values as to your liking
One great use of mirage I have found for myself is when using elinks for browsing certain websites which are supposed to be text based but I may stumble upon a couple of interesting sounding images. Mirage can then be easily invoked from elinks to view the images from the website.
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