A Guide to the Eye of Gnome Image Viewer

The default image viewer for the GNOME desktop is called 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. You can search for it by typing 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.

If Eye Of Gnome isn't installed you should be able to find it within your distribution's package manager such as Ubuntu Software, 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 by typing the following:

sudo apt install eog

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

dnf install eog

Finally, for openSUSE, the command is:

zypper install eog

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 open an image in a couple of ways.

First, clicking an image in your file browser, Nautilus on GNOME, will most likely open it in Eye of GNOME by default.

Then, with Eye of GNOME open, select the Menu icon, denoted by three stacked lines. Choose Open in the resulting menu.

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

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

Like with a lot of GNOME apps, Eye of GNOME's design is fairly clean and minimal. The toolbar is a perfect reflection of this philosophy.

On the left side, you'll find the zoom controls. By default, Eye of GNOME will try to scale your image to best fit your screen. You can manually override this by using either the zoom in or zoom out icon to display the image how you like. The space between the icons is a drop-down menu that lets you manually select a zoom percentage to display your image as well.

The opposite side of the toolbar contains two icons of its own. To the left, there's the full screen icon. It will switch Eye of GNOME into full-screen mode.

Next to it, you'll find the Image menu from before. It contains the bulk of Eye of GNOME's controls and options.

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.

Selecting the left arrow shows the previous image in the folder where the current image is located. 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. Pressing the left button rotates the screen 90 degrees to the left. The right button rotates the image 90 degrees to the right.

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 a 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 image menu headings are as follows:

• Open...
• Open With
• Save
• Save As...
• Print...
• Set as Wallpaper
• Image Properties
• Slideshow
• Show
• Preferences
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Help
• About Image Viewer

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 get to a few more options in sub-menus to help control how Eye of GNOME behaves.

The Show menu contains options to change which controls and information Eye of GNOME displays. It gives you access to enable or disable the:

• Side Pane
• Image Gallery
• Status Bar

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

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 the 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.