Reading through comments of an article featured on the jakilinux.org site I’ve stumbled upon somebody complaining that Gwenview is underexposed. Let’s take it on then, using a SVN pullout for KDE4.

Gwenview is a very useful image viewer for KDE4, also featuring:

• printing;
• rotating;
• mirroring;

There are not too many functions and settings included so far, but a lot is scheduled to be added. The start page allows us to browse “places”, like directories, drives, mobile devices, network folders. Apart from this, it also allows browsing the history of places we’ve already seen. Currently the program lacks, or I couldn’t find it, the option to clear this list.

The application features plugins, although this option doesn’t yet work. These will allow the use of a wide range of effects on the selected image. A plugin that reduces the “red eyes” effect is being worked on. Gwenview has a very eye-catching slideshow feature.

A side bar allows work to be done on the image. One can rotate the image (anti)clock-wise, mirror it horizontally or vertically, or wipe it completely (delete). One can also launch a more advanced image editor such as Gimp for bitmaps or Inkscape for vector editing. The side-bar can be hidden by clicking the “Hide side-bar” option at the top of the window.

Settings for the application are quite scarce to date. The basic settings below are currently offered:

• main window’s background colour setting;
• transparent images’ “background” selection;
• the mouse scroll behaviour, or thumbnail/preview cache removal option (Useful for people with low available disk space)

The bottom of the screen now features a zoom bar, like the one available in other KDE applications such as Dolphin.

These are most of the features of the application, which is currently available in Subversion. Everybody interested is welcome to use/test and submit their views/bug reports.

This article was also featured on the author’s blog: KDE4 applications : Gwenview [in Polish].

Translated-by : el es, proof-read by Phillip Smith