3 Large image viewers for Linux

3 Large image viewers for Linux

Recently, I wanted to view some large images of electronic schematics in Linux (Ubuntu). I had two TIFF images, one of 140 MP (24193 x 6489 px) and a smaller one of 44 MP (8772 x 5020 px) both 1-bit monochrome compressed with CCIT G4 algorithm.

So I tried to open them with the default associated program (Eye of GNOME) and before any image was displayed, my 2 GB RAM computer started swapping to make room for eog process. Therefore I needed other image viewers.

Here is a comparison of some free image viewers that run on Linux and can display large images using low RAM. I compared two features: speed of zooming/panning/dragging and memory usage. I used my two images for comparison, thus 44 MP displayed as RGB takes (8772px * 5020px * 24bpp) / 8 / 1024 / 1024 = 126 MB and 140 MP takes (24193px * 6489px * 24bpp) / 8 / 1024 / 1024 = 450 MB.

Therefore any viewer that uses more than RAM than the uncompressed RGB image size is useless for large images.

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