pqiv is a GTK-3 based command-line image viewer with a minimal UI. It is highly customizable, can be fully controlled from scripts, and has support for various file formats including PDF, Postscript, video files and archives.

Chafa is a command-line utility that converts all kinds of images, including animated GIFs, into ANSI/Unicode character output that can be displayed in a terminal.

feh is an X11 image viewer aimed mostly at console users. Unlike most other viewers, it does not have a fancy GUI, but simply displays images. It can also be used to set the desktop wallpaper. It is controlled via commandline arguments and configurable key/mouse actions.

Überzug++ is a command line utility written in C++ which allows to draw images on terminals by using X11/Wayland child windows, sixels, kitty and iterm2.

Advantages over w3mimgdisplay:

• Support for Wayland: Sway, Hyprland, niri and Wayfire

• No race conditions as a new window is created to display images

• Expose events will be processed, so images will be redrawn on switch workspaces

• Tmux support on X11, Sway and Hyprland

• Terminals without the WINDOWID environment variable are supported

• Chars are used as position - and size unit

• No memory leak (usage of smart pointers)

• A lot of image formats supported (through OpenCV and libvips).

• GIF and animated WEBP support on X11, Sixel, Sway and hyprland

• Fast image downscaling (through OpenCV and OpenCL)

• Cache resized images for faster viewing

gpicview is a lightweight GTK+ 2.x based image viewer. It is the default image viewer on LXDE desktop environment.

sxiv is an alternative to feh and qiv. Its primary goal is to provide the most basic features required for fast image viewing. It has vi key bindings and works nicely with tiling window managers. Its code base should be kept small and clean to make it easy for you to dig into it and customize it for your needs.

Catimg is a little program that prints images in the terminal. It supports JPEG, PNG and GIF formats.

Viewnior is an image viewer program. Created to be simple, fast and elegant. Its minimalistic interface provides more screenspace for your images. Among its features are:

1. Fullscreen & Slideshow

2. Rotate, flip, crop, save, delete images

3. Animation support

4. Browse only selected images

5. Navigation window

6. Set image as wallpaper (Gnome 2, Gnome 3, XFCE, LXDE, FluxBox, Nitrogen)

7. Simple interface

8. EXIF and IPTC metadata

9. Configurable mouse actions

Swayimg is a fully customizable and lightweight image viewer for Wayland based display servers. It supports the most popular image formats (JPEG, JPEG XL, PNG, GIF, SVG, WebP, HEIF/AVIF, AV1F/AVIFS, TIFF, EXR, BMP, PNM, TGA, QOI, DICOM, Farbfeld). It has fully customizable keyboard bindings, colors, and many other parameters. It also supports loading images from files and pipes, and provides gallery and viewer modes with slideshow and animation support. It also includes a Sway integration mode: the application creates an overlay above the currently active window, which gives the illusion that you are opening the image directly in a terminal window.

Geeqie is a lightweight GTK+ based image viewer for Unix like operating systems. It features: EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata browsing and editing interoperability; easy integration with other software; geeqie works on files and directories, there is no need to import images; fast preview for many raw image formats; tools for image comparison, sorting and managing photo collection. Geeqie was initially based on GQview.

The hydrus network client is an application written for internet-fluent media nerds who have large image/swf/webm collections. It browses with tags instead of folders, a little like a booru on your desktop. Advanced users can share tags and files anonymously through custom servers that any user may run. Everything is free and privacy is the first concern.

Qimgv is a configurable Qt image viewer, with optional video support.

ytfzf is a POSIX script that helps you find PeerTube or YouTube videos without requiring API and opens/downloads them using mpv/ytdl.

lsix lists the images in a directory by displaying their thumbnails. Images are displayed in sixel graphics. lsix automatically detects terminal features and adapts the output to offer the highest quality possible. It can usually display non-bitmap graphics, including PDF. Your terminal should be sixel capable, like xterm -ti vt340.

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

• 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 behavior.

• Highly scriptable with IPC via imv-msg.

Libjpeg implements JPEG image encoding, decoding, and transcoding. JPEG is a standardized compression method for full-color and gray-scale images. It also includes programs that provide conversion between the JPEG format and image files in PBMPLUS PPM/PGM, GIF, BMP, and Targa file formats, as well as lossless JPEG manipulations such as rotation, scaling or cropping:

1. cjpeg

2. djpeg

3. jpegtran

4. rdjpgcom

5. wrjpgcom

OpenSlide is a C library for reading whole slide image files (also known as virtual slides). It provides a consistent and simple API for reading files from multiple vendors.

Flameshot is a screenshot program. Features:

• Customizable appearance.

• Easy to use.

• In-app screenshot edition.

• DBus interface.

• Upload to Imgur.

Mtpaint is a graphic editing program which uses the GTK+ toolkit. It can create and edit indexed palette or 24bit RGB images, offers basic painting and palette manipulation tools. It also handles JPEG, JPEG2000, GIF, TIFF, WEBP, BMP, PNG, XPM formats.

Simple encoder and decoder for blurhashes. Contains a command line program as well as a shared library.

jpegoptim provides lossless optimization (based on optimizing the Huffman tables) and "lossy" optimization based on setting maximum quality factor.

The JasPer Project is an initiative to provide a reference implementation of the codec specified in the JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard (i.e., ISO/IEC 15444-1).

WebP is a new image format that provides lossless and lossy compression for images. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller in size compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index. WebP supports lossless transparency (also known as alpha channel) with just 22% additional bytes. Transparency is also supported with lossy compression and typically provides 3x smaller file sizes compared to PNG when lossy compression is acceptable for the red/green/blue color channels.

Libicns is a library for the manipulation of Mac OS IconFamily resource type files (ICNS). icns2png and png2icns are provided to convert between PNG and ICNS. icns2png will extract image files from ICNS files under names like "Foo_48x48x32.png" useful for installing for use with .desktop files. Additionally, icontainer2png is provided for extracting icontainer icon files.