Pixels, not grains.

[vakkotaur]

I've been going through the manual for Jay's oldest digital camera and while I'm not proficient with it, I can use it. Last night I tried to read a few images off of the memory card. After a bit of figuring out just where Ultima (Slackware) puts a memory card, I could copy the pictures to the laptop.

Now I have enough working so that I can use the camera and not worry about filling the memory card. I'll be taking a few pictures this weekend and seeing how well things go. I plan to take the camera to Penguicon and RCFM, too. I wonder how much, if any, more film I'll be using.

The only snag I hit so far is a minor one, which shouldn't be too hard to rectify (famous last words). I don't have an image viewer I really like on the laptop yet. It'll have to be something that isn't absolutely GNOME or KDE specific, as the only window manager is XFCE, and is tolerable on an older machine.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Your web browser will work as an image viewer for individual photos. Even the small packages, like Epiphany or Galeon, will be adequate for that if you don't want full blown Mozilla. Firefox works too.

If you need something that generates thumbnails to the screen the way gthumb does, you might just try gthumb. It runs fine for me under xfce. I think it does start a couple of gnome tasks running in order to support itself, though, so if you are memory or disk space constricted, it may be painful to use.

Your memory card probably appeared as a "pseudo-scsi" device, no? Something like sda or sdb? That's what memory cards and USB flash memory devices do on my slackware installations.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

For individual images, a browser is fine. I want to be able to hit a 'next' button or key and get to the next image in the directory. I have a few choices that I'll look through tonight if I'm not busy with something else. The thumbnail view is already provided by xfm, so that's not a big concern.

I expected the card to show up as a pseudo-scsi device USB stuff does, too, but it turn out that it becomes /dev/hdc1. I've made a proper mount point for it and edited fstab so it will be easier to deal with from now on.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Another thought. If gthumb is not an acceptable solution (I do like the interface on it though) then have a closer look at the xfce native file manager application. It does give thumbnails for recognizable image files in any directory, and you can configure it to launch any small viewing program, like Image-Magick or Epiphany when you double-click an icon.

Just checked it out. I'm not on the current version of anything here at work, but even with slackware 9.1 and xfce 3.9, a right mouse click in the file manager gives you usable options for an image. "Preview this image" enlarges the thumbnail. "Display this image" launches Image-Magick for a full sized view and the ability to print. "Edit this image" launches GIMP for full Photoshop-like capabilities.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

ImageMagick is already there and while it works, it seems to not do the thing I want. I see a 'previous' and 'next' option in the menu, but it seems to only work if the images are already open in another IM window, which isn't what I'm after.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm looking at Image-Magick version 5.9.x I think. I found that the next and previous work if you start it from the command line.

cd to the directory with the images you want

display *.jpg [or whatever, it handles a zillion file formats]

The window now opens on the first file that matches your wild card, and next will move to the next one, etc. A left mouse click opens an extensive toolbox. (I didn't realize this program could crop and scale and all that, but apparently it can.) A right mouse click opens a brief popup menu of the most common commands. The space bar is the same as next. There are a whole bunch of shortcut keys.

I haven't found a way to invoke this mode from the GUI alone, but it works quite nicely from the command line.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Almost GUI approach. From the xfce file manager, select the directory with the images in it. Right click, choose open with. A prompt line opens for the program name. Put in 'display ./*' and press enter. Image-Magick pops up for all the image files in that directory, and lets you go next/previous through them.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

That works, but I'll be looking to see what I get that will do it a bit better. The need to click and select each time gets tiresome after being used to IrfanView (Windows), gthumb (Mandrake), and KuickShow (Fedora). If gthumb will be happy on Xfce, I won't mind using it... if I can get it to compile into a useful result, that is. Then I'll have to see about getting xfm set up to use it.

While most of the time the only person using the machine will be me or maybe Jay, there will be some times when others may be using it and I want things to be as simple as I can make them. I don't want people saying that Linux is too difficult and screwy to use if I can avoid it. I don't expect to convert anyone to using Linux, but I do want the experience to be a positive, or at least non-negative, one.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I don't know the Windows or Fedora programs you mention, but I agree that gthumb is probably intuitive for Windows users. It comes packaged with most distributions but may not have been installed if you deliberately omitted gnome. You should be able to pick it up as a package either from your distribution CD or from some archive on the net.

I've just checked, and it will start gconfd if that isn't already running. Otherwise, no gnome tasks are required apparently, but some libraries might be.

[taper.livejournal.com]

The image viewer I use a lot is gqview -- not gnome-specific, I believe, and pretty nice for viewing directories full of stuff.