What is the fastest way to view images from the terminal?

Question

The terminal is very fast and convenient way to quickly access directories and files (faster than find and click on the directory).

One thing that it cannot show in text-mode is "pictures".

What is a best way to view pictures (like you see images thumbnail in Nautilus) when you are working in the terminal (e.g. command nautilus or any program - but should be fast and convenient)?

Answer 1

The way to "double-click" on a file from the command line is xdg-open.

If you're on Gnome (probably, if you're using Nautilus), you can use eog directly, or any other image program (feh is quite good).

feh <image-name>      

If you want to consult image-name file easilly.

Answer 2

If you happen to have installed imagemagick, you can use its very handy display command-line tool.

display path/to/picture.png

Answer 3

I usually run python -m http.server 8080 (in python2: python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080) from a folder containing the image and view it from the browser at localhost:8080/path/to/image.jpg. Works great to browse and look at different image and text files in that same directory.

Edit: This method also works for remote boxes. Just run the python server as above, and if the ports are open you can connect to myserver.com:8080/path/to/image.jpg. If the server does not expose ports, you can set up an ssh tunnel with ssh [email protected] -N -L localhost:8080:localhost:8080 and then view the images from your local browser at localhost:8080/path/to/image.jpg. Note this http interface is much faster than ssh -X.

Answer 4

I have created a tool that uses various unicode block graphics characters to improve the resolution (compared to the canonical 2 pixel per characterapproach taken by other solutions posted here). It also automatically displays images in a thumbnail mode if multiple images are provided as input.

Installation:

git clone https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer.git
cd TerminalImageViewer/src/main/cpp
make
sudo make install

Usage:

tiv <image(s)>

More details at the github project: https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer

Example screenshot:

Answer 5

No dependencies, one C file, one header file: imcat

Works on linux, macos, windows. Automatically scales to terminal width, with quality down-sampling.

Answer 6

I guess feh would be the one you are looking for.

Although popping out a terminal-like window for picture display as mplayer does for video playing, Feh is still considered as a terminal-based picture viewer due to its command-intensive control style.

Answer 7

If you're in pure terminal with framebuffer activated, I'd recommend fbi. It's always in my after-install to do list.

Otherwise, eog is the default picture opener in Gnome, as Kevin mentioned. Also, Shotwell seems to open pretty fast for me... I'm pretty sure there are hundreds. :-)

Answer 8

If you're on OS X, iTerm 2 supports displaying inline images:

As you can imagine, this can be highly useful when you just want to display an image without going in and opening up Preview.app or having to open the Finder to the image and hitting spacebar on the image.

The feature is documented at iTerm2's feature page

Answer 9

Surprised that the Terminology terminal emulator is not among the answers. As easy as tyls and then clicking on an image:

or someting like tycat image.png, for example:

Plus a lot more. An old video, almost 3 years ago, demonstrating Terminology 0.3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibPziLRGvkg#action=share.

Answer 10

The kitty terminal can display inside the terminal with the icat "kitten"

E.g.

kitty +kitten icat /path/to/image

Example:

The kitty documentation suggests creating an alias, e.g.

alias icat="kitty +kitten icat"

So that then you can simply do:

icat /path/to/image

Answer 11

w3m's imgdisplay library is able to display images directly. It only works on some terminal emulators such as Xterm and URxvt.

ranger is a file browser that makes use of the library to display previews. Add this to ranger's configuration file to enable the feature:

set preview_images true

Answer 12

From the terminal? Why not in the terminal: cacaview might be the fastest. By default it's fastest if the terminal has no graphics.

In Debian: sudo apt-get install caca-utils

Answer 13

Actually, there is a way to show a PNG file in a terminal in text-mode, using picture-tube:

You can look at the project on GitHub.

The image is of course an approximation of the actual image, given the fact that the smallest pixel is a character - try to have a look at the result in a text editor, you will see a huge number of color codes.

You can install the tool like this (assuming you have already installed node/npm): npm install -g picture-tube

Answer 14

There is a tool here called catimg that works really well:

https://github.com/posva/catimg

Also has deb packages on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/catimg

Answer 15

Another great terminal-based picture viewer is fim, which is a improved fbi with a vim-like control system.

Answer 16

The Ranger file manager enabling the image-preview in settings.

Answer 17

In linux you can install gnome-open.

# In Debian flavors

sudo apt-get install gnome-open

Then create an alias:

alias open='gnome-open'

Then you can:

open file.pdf
open file.jpg
etc

Answer 18

This is a 4 year-old-question but I found that people still look at it. So, today I would like to answer my own question specifically only for iTerm2.

At first time I asked this question. The term of "fastest" I was thinking of viewing image as fast as cat command displaying text. So, today I found the answer on iTerm2, which are the two handy commands name imgcat and imgls.

To use them, the first let's install iterm2-nigthly:

$ brew cask install iterm2-nightly

then visit the website:

https://github.com/olivere/iterm2-imagetools

and install imgcat and imgls commands:

$ go install github.com/olivere/iterm2-imagetools/cmd/imgcat
$ go install github.com/olivere/iterm2-imagetools/cmd/imgls

So, I really love them and also hope this will be useful for you all!

Answer 19

You can also use chafa (on GitHub). It has a gallery with plenty of examples, showing different options. It even supports animated GIFs.

Answer 20

pxl is a pretty cool option which hasn't been mentioned yet. Similar to picture-tube which was previously posted in that it shows the image directly in the terminal although it supports more image formats.

Answer 21

I just use the Chrome webrowser, which supports jpg, svg, png, ico, animated gif... basically everything I'm likely to need:

google-chrome ./myphoto.jpg

If you prefer Firefox:

firefox ./myphoto.jpg

Answer 22

img2sixel

Fast, convenient, and easy to use.

To use:

$ img2sixel <image_name>

To install (ubuntu 18.04):

$ sudo apt install libsixel-bin

Example (scaled down to 400 pixels wide with -w 400):

There's a list of terminal requirements in the link, but it's worked with any terminal I've tried it on. I won't bother listing all the supported terminals, but here are some:

DEC VT series, VT240/VT241/VT330/VT340/VT282/VT284/VT286/VT382

DECterm(dxterm)

Kermit

ZSTEM 340

WRQ Reflection

RLogin

mlterm

Works on each of X, WIN32 GDI, framebuffer, Android, Cocoa version.

XTerm (compiled with --enable-sixel-graphics option)

yaft

Mintty (>= 2.6.0)

Answer 23

If you have any relatively recent version of ImageMagick, you can output images to any terminal emulator that supports the SIXEL format. This is different from the ImageMagick display command, as the latter requires an X11 session and spawns a separate window, while the former works with any supported terminal, even over SSH. The following command takes an input image, converts it to a SIXEL image, and outputs it to stdout so the terminal emulator can render it:

convert input.png six:-

---

_{Sample image: Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Answer 24

I just found this page, and it is still very relevant today. OP didn't really specify if they want X or fb viewer.

I use a small utility called pho: http://www.shallowsky.com/software/pho/

Needs X, so call from command line in a terminal window. Views many picture formats, gif and jpg for sure... some others as well.

Can do wildcard globbing from command line: eg. "$ pho img00??.jpg" will view all files that match in order. Space goes forward through list and backspace goes back. Its quick loading individual images -- hold down space and you fly through them.

Very fast if you want to look through a bunch of pictures, flag ones of interest, rotate, delete unwanted... I keep coming back to it.

From the web page above:

pho (pronounced like the first syllable in "photo") is a lightweight program for viewing large numbers of images quickly, rotating or deleting some, and making notes about what to do with each image -- for instance, for going through hundreds of images after uploading them from a digital camera.

Answer 25

Even tough there are great answers given, my issue was to view images in terminal itself, without openning any graphical application, so i wrote my own little script. I only needed to identify the image and did not need al the details of it and did not want to download any relatively big packet, if anyone needs they can also use it: https://github.com/Deniz97/terminal-image-viewer

Answer 26

I have a shell alias for macOS called preview that can (1) display an image inline (-i or --inline option), either from stdin or specified filepath(s), and (2) just open an image in Apple's Preview app (without any option), the latter also either from stdin or filepath(s), e.g.:

cat image.jpg | preview

preview -i image.png

Inline display only works with the iTerm imgcat alias, so you need iTerm installed, running, and frontmost. But preview checks if all that is true.

Online here: https://github.com/JayBrown/Tools/blob/master/Aliases/preview

Answer 27

feh.

To determine the fastest, we must measure the time. Here are my times for opening and displaying a 700x500 pixel png benchmark image. I took 10 samples for each program. I'm using Ubuntu22.04 from Win11/WSLg with a 12th Gen Intel core i7-12800H. All times are in milliseconds.

Program	avg	min	max	stdev	Measurement method	comment
feh	19.9	11	24	5.1	user time	WINNER
catimg	24.3	23	26	1.0	realtime	low resolution, in-terminal
dillo	27.0	16	36	6.8	user time	but must manually maximize window
tiv default	105.0	95	113	5.4	realtime	5x10px thumbnail in terminal. 390MB brew download!
tiv -h 50 -w 150	132.3	117	156	11.1	realtime	comperable to catimg but with compression artifacts. 390MB brew download!
eog	333.3	206	631	158.3	user time	yet nice
picture-tube	1377.2	1321	1448	43.2	wristwatch	terrible image quality, opens seperate window
gimp	1422.1	1333	1483	57.5	user time+system time	opens gimp, then loads image. These may be underestimated by 30-50%.
nautilus	2633.3	2000	3500	522.0	wristwatch	only get thunbnail
ffplay	3055.6	2500	4000	583.3	wristwatch	needs pipe to dev/null
display	25925.6	57	98000	34239.5	user time, wristwatch	UI buttons don't work
cacaview	317888.9	5000	2748000	911341.2	wristwatch	terrible image quality, opens seperate window

Answer 28

What is a best way to view pictures (like you see images thumbnail in Nautilus) when you are working in the terminal [...] ?

This part of the question about previewing multiple images at once has not yet been addressed properly. Most image viewers (with the exception of TerminalImageViewer) will not show multiple thumbnails when called with multiple image files. They might display them in a slideshow, which is not always practical (e.g. when browsing through icons).

As a solution, I use a usual file manager in "thumbnail" mode to display all images that I copied to a temporary directory. For example, to display all icons from the KDE icon theme "Breeze" where the filename matches *search*:

tmpdir=$(mktemp -d -t image-previews-XXXXX)

find /usr/share/icons/breeze -name "*search*" -exec \
    bash -c '
        tmpdir=$1; 
        file=$2; 
        newfile=${file/\/usr\/share\/icons\/breeze\//}; 
        newfile=${newfile//\//-}; 
        cp $file $tmpdir/$newfile
    ' _ $tmpdir {} \; 

pcmanfm-qt $tmpdir

Discussion

This finds and copies all Breeze icons matching *search* to a temporary directory, replacing the path relative to the Breeze installation directory with a filename that has - instead of the directory separator /. This way, the files are all in one directory for previewing, and won't overwrite each other.

Then this starts a file manager (here pcmanfm-qt) to show the files in the temporary directory. After it starts, it has to be manually set to thumbnail view for best results. Unlike other image viewers, file managers usually can render SVGs into preview thumbnails.

The find command uses a technique with positional parameters in a subshell to allow executing multiple commands in find including variable evaluation, as documented here.

Answer 29

In Linux Mint:

xviewer logo.png

Answer 30

If you are using plain text console (not even the framebuffer), then there is (still) zgv - https://www.svgalib.org/rus/zgv/

It requires a PC compatible, though (i.e. i386 and VGA)