Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Article submitted by Lucas Nussbaum, based on an article published on Linux Weekly News (with the permission of LWN’s Jonathan Corbet). We are running out of articles ! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like !

Mirage is a relatively new image viewing application which has been designed with speed in mind. It uses GTK+.

The project was started in March, 2006 according to the CHANGELOG file. Mirage has undergone rapid development since then, with fifteen releases so far.

It has all the features one will expect from a good xv or gthumb alternative:

• Supported image formats include png, jpg, svg, xpm, gif, bmp, tiff, and others.
• Has the ability to cycle through large collections of images.
• Images can be dynamically resized, full-screen and best fit modes are available.
• A built-in slide show viewer is included.
• Has a random image viewing function.
• A user-selectable status bar shows basic image metadata.
• An image properties pulldown shows more detailed image metadata.
• Images can be rotated, zoomed, cropped, resized and flipped.
• Panning through zoomed-in images can be performed with the mouse.
• Many of the program’s options are user-configurable.
• A number of command-line switches are available.
• A number of shortcuts are bound to various key combinations.

The online documentation explains the application in more detail.

However, Mirage still miss some of xv’s features:

• A grab function for turning windows into images.
• The ability to convert and save images to another format.
• A full-featured color editor window, especially the R/G/B/mono linearity adjustments.
• The lack of a spinning clock as an indication of ongoing image processing.
• Cropping via mouse clicks in the main window.

Some of these missing functions, such as image grab and convert, can be handled by external commands. Perhaps that is in line with the Mirage lightweight design philosophy, but the omissions come at the cost of user inconvenience.

Mirage is available in Debian Testing and Unstable, and in Ubuntu since Feisty. It is relatively bug-free and actively developed.

It has a nice look and feel, and performs very well for the basic job of viewing large collections of images.

Screenshots are available on Mirage homepage.