A Guide To The Eye Of Gnome Image Viewer

The default image viewer for the GNOME desktop is called Eye Of Gnome. 

Opening Eye Of Gnome

You can start Eye Of Gnome from within GNOME by bringing up the GNOME dashboard and searching for it within the applications view. if you are using Ubuntu you can open the Unity Dash and search for "Image Viewer". 

Alternatively, you can open Eye Of Gnome in any distribution by opening a terminal window and typing the following:

eog &

The & at the end of the line makes the command run as a background process and returns the control back to the terminal so that you can run more commands if you need to.

Installing Eye Of Gnome

If Eye Of Gnome isn't installed you should be able to find it within your distribution's package manager such as the Ubuntu Software Centre, Synaptic or Yum Extender.

If you are using a Debian based distribution you can install Eye Of Gnome by opening a terminal and using apt-get by typing the following:

sudo apt-get install eog

For Fedora, use Yum, and the command is as follows:

yum install eog

Finally, for openSUSE, the command is:

zypper install eog

The Eye Of Gnome Interface

The actual interface for the Eye Of Gnome image viewer is very basic. There is simply a blank screen with a toolbar. On the toolbar are two icons. The first is a plus symbol and the other, which is justified to the right of the toolbar, has two little arrows on it.

 By default, the toolbar is inactive until you open an image. 

Eye Of Gnome also has a menu. If you are using Ubuntu the menu will be at the top of the screen as opposed to sitting within the application window. You can adjust this behavior by using the Unity Tweak tool.

Opening An Image In Eye Of Gnome

You can open an image in a couple of ways.

The first and most obvious way to open an image is to click the "image" menu and select the "open" option.

A file browser will appear and you can select the image you wish to view.

The second way to open an image is to drag the image from the file manager into Eye Of Gnome.

The Toolbar

As mentioned previously there are two icons on the toolbar.

The icon with the two little arrows serves one purpose and that is to toggle between full-screen view and windowed view. Clicking it whilst in windowed view switches to a full-screen view and clicking it whilst in full-screen view switches back to the windowed view.

The icon with the plus symbol works as a zoom function. Clicking the icon brings up a slider. Dragging the slider to the right zooms in on the image and dragging to the left zooms out.

Other Functionality In Windowed Mode

Whilst there is an image open there are four more icons available. If you hover over the image an arrow appears to the left of the image and another arrow appears to the right of the image about halfway down the screen.

Clicking the left arrow shows the previous image in the folder where the current image is located. Clicking on the right arrow shows the next image.

At the bottom of the screen, there are two more arrows.

One points to the left and the other to the right. Clicking the left button rotates the screen 90 degrees to the left. Clicking the right button rotates the image 90 degrees to the right.

Other Functionality In Full-Screen Mode

Whilst an image is displayed in full screen you can view another toolbar by hovering the mouse at the top of the screen.

The icons are as follows:

• Show the first image in folder
• Show the previous image
• Show the next image
• Show the last image in folder
• Enlarge the image
• Shrink the image
• Shrink the image to the original size
• Rotate the image 90 degrees to the left
• Rotate the image 90 degrees to the right

• Display Image Gallery Pane
• Pause/Resume Slide Show

The first four icons let you choose which image to display. You can also zoom in and out of the images by enlarging and shrinking them. As with the windowed mode, you can also rotate the images.

The gallery pane icon shows a list of images at the bottom of the screen which lets you preview images in particular folder.

The slide show button flicks through each image every few seconds.

The full-screen view has the same arrow icons for moving to the next and previous image and for rotating images as the windowed mode.

The Menu

There are 5 menu headings:

• Image
• Edit
• View
• Go
• Help

The Image menu lets you open images, save images, save the image as a different type or with a different name, print the image, set the image as the desktop wallpaper, show the folder that contains the images and view the image properties.

The image properties are as follows:

• Name
• Width
• Height
• Type
• Size In Bytes
• Folder

From the Image menu, you can also close the application.

The Edit menu lets you copy the image, flip the image horizontally and vertically, rotate the image in either direction, move it to the rubbish bin, delete the image or change the Eye Of Gnome preferences.

The View menu lets you display a status bar, view a gallery, view a side panel (which shows the image properties), zoom in and out, toggle to full screen and display a slideshow.

The Go menu lets you flick between the images in the folder by displaying the first, last, previous and next images.

The Help menu has a help file and an about window.

Eye Of Gnome Preferences

The preferences window has three tabs:

• Image View
• Slideshow
• Plugins

The Image View tab is split into three sections:

• Image Enhancements
• Background
• Transparent Parts

The enhancements section lets you choose whether you want smooth images when zoomed in and out and whether automatic orientation is on or off.

The background lets you choose a color for the background when an image is smaller than the window.

The transparent parts let you decide how to show the transparent parts of an image. The options are as follows:

• As check pattern (default option)
• As custom color
• As background

The slideshow section has two sections:

• Image zoom
• Sequence

The zoom section lets you decide whether images are expanded to fit the screen or not. The sequence section lets you decide how long each image is shown for and you can choose whether to loop around the sequence.

The plugins tab shows a list of available plugins for Eye Of Gnome.