Best Image Viewing and Editing Tools for Linux

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One of the main concerns a new or wannabe Linux user has is the availability of application for particular needs. However, the Linux application scene has changed tremendously over the last few years and today we have great applications catering to all your needs in Linux. In this article we take a look at some of today’s best image viewing and image editing tools that are available for Linux.

Image Viewers for Linux

Picasa

Google Picasa is a popular image viewer and management tool that is also available in Linux. It lets you manage your photos in one place and contains tools to help you easily find them. It also has basic editing features that let you fix red eye, crop photos, and so forth. You can also upload your photos to Picasa web albums and share them with your friends and family.

Ksquirrel

Ksquirrel is an image viewer application for KDE. It has features like disk navigator, thumbnails, multiple directory view, and KEXIF and KIPI plug-in support.

gThumb

An image viewer application for the Gnome desktop, gThumb supports various common image file formats and also lets you view the EXIF data attached to JPEF images. You can also view an image rotated or flipped. Its image browser feature lets your browse your hard drive for image files displaying thumbnails for these files and also allows for easy copying, moving, and deletion of image files. You can also bookmark folders. Its image organizer feature lets you add comments to your images and organize images in catalogs and libraries.

Gwenview

Gwenview is a popular image viewing application for KDE. It works with all the image formats supported by KDE and has the capability to display images with alpha channels, and it can also display image properties and image specific Meta information. It also has some basic image editing capabilities like rotation, lossless manipulation for JPEG files, etc. It also includes basic file management features for easy copying, moving, and deletion of image files.

digiKam

digiKam is a feature rich image management tool for Linux. With digiKam you can organize, view, tag and share your photos.

Feh

Feh is an image viewer application for Linux. It has support for slideshows, image viewing in full screen, recursive file opening, file lists, and loading images via http. It also includes some basic editing features like rotating images.

Eye of GNOME

Eye of GNOME is the official image viewer for the Gnome desktop. It supports most of the common image file formats.

KPhotoAlbum

KPhotoAlbum is an image viewer and organizer for Linux. The main aim of this application is to provide the user with an easy way to annotate images and videos.

Image Editors for Linux

GIMP

GIMP is the most popular alternative for Adobe Photoshop. It is free and open source and is the most powerful image editing application for Linux platform. GIMP tries to offer as many features as Photoshop has and succeeds to a large extent in achieving that although its interface may be little intriguing in the beginning.

GIMPshop

GIMPshop is a modification of the GIMP application mentioned above that tries to replicate the look and feel of Adobe Photoshop while retaining all of its features.

KolourPaint

KolourPaint is a free image editing application for the KDE desktop. Although it hasn’t been updated for a while, it still sports an impressive collection of features for a free image editing software application.

Krita

Krita is the image editing application included in KOffice. It is easy to use and has some advanced features like layers, scriptable (with Python and Ruby), RAW file import, and so forth.