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I have a slow network connection over which I'm forwarding x11 over ssh.

I want to view images on the remote host (Ubuntu) quickly and efficiently.

I'm looking for an image viewer that will take into account the image viewer window's resolution and downsize the image before sending it over the network, instead of sending the full size image.

The images I want to view will be around 5MB and I only need to be able to browse through tiny thumbnails of the images to identify the image I'm looking for.

It is not necessary to be able to see more than one image at a time. Highest speed over slow network connection is the priority.

Thanks! Matthew

EDIT: It's possible that the way x11 forwarding works, only the image at the display resolution will be transferred anyway. If that's true, please confirm and the question still stands for which image viewer will be the fastest over a slow connection

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    I use display from the Imagemagick package
    – wnrph
    Jun 11, 2012 at 23:10
  • aristotex I didn't see your comment. Probably display and mogrify together are the best solution
    – Bruno9779
    Jun 11, 2012 at 23:25
  • Tried display from the imagemagick package and it was unfortunately horrendously slow. Took about 1m30s to open a 500x332 image. When I used the -resize option to downsize the image to 100px wide there was no observable performance increase. I tried gpicview on the same image (500x332 resolution) and it only took around 30 seconds to open.
    – Matthew
    Jun 12, 2012 at 16:58

1 Answer 1

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I would tackle this differently. The data overhead for an image viewer is minimal compared to the size of your pics. Instead I would install imagemagick on the remote machine and resize a copy of the pics with mogrify.

cd yourpicturesfolder
mkdir thumbs
cp * /thumbs
cd /thumbs
mogrify -resize 150 *.jpg

150 is the width in pixels, I think it is a good size for what you need: about 50kb and viewable.

Of course this implies that you have admin access to the remote machine and enough disk space for the copies.

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  • I have root access, and this is a great first half to the question, but once I have the small images what application should I use to view them? I don't want to just copy them all over ftp because there could be hundreds of images and I might find what I'm looking for in the first dozen.
    – Matthew
    Jun 12, 2012 at 16:55
  • 1
    feh
    – Jacob
    Jan 22, 2017 at 0:20

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