The fbida project contains a few applications for viewing and editing images.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The fbida project contains a few applications for viewing and editing images, with the main focus being photos. The applications are:

fbi: This is a image viewer for the linux framebuffer console.

fbgs: A wrapper script for viewing ps/pdf files on the framebuffer console using fbi.

ida: This is a X11 application (Motif based) for viewing images. Some basic editing functions are available too.

exiftran: command line tool to do lossless transformations of JPEG images. Works much like jpegtran, but unlike jpegtran it does not ignore the EXIF data ;)

thumbnail.cgi: Small and fast CGI script (written in C) to extract EXIF thumbnails from jpeg images and send them to the web browser.

Fbida melds two programs, fbi (frame-buffer imageviewer) and ida. fbi displays console images, and ida runs on X Windows. They share common image-decoding libraries, so the developer merged the two apps to save on doing everything twice.

Fbida comes with most Linux distributions. On Fedora it comes in two packages, fbida and fbida-ida. On Debian it's fbi and ida. Ida is not needed for console use.

Using fbida is easy. Just hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch to a console and run it like this:

$ fbi filename

If you get the error "can handle only packed pixel frame buffers," which is quite possibly one of the most uninformative error messages of all time, simply pass in a vga parameter at boot. GRUB users add it to the end of the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. LILO users add "append=".

How do you know what to use? Refer to Section 5.3 in the Framebuffer Howto. For example, to get 1024x768x16 bits, GRUB looks like this:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash vga=0x314

fbi will play a slideshow. Change to a directory full of images, then run:

$ fbi *

You can zoom in, zoom out, and scroll up, down, and sideways. You can also configure your desired options permanently in ~/.fbirc. man fbi tells all.