This is a fork of Artur Kovacs' "Emulsion" image viewer, forked from the point when it got discontinued.
After trying a few of the Rust-based image viewers currently on GitHub (as of December 2021), this one appeared to be the most functional, and the closest to what I've been looking for. However, it was missing a few features + had a few annoying quirks that I wanted to try to resolve. Seeing as the original repo had been abandoned by the original author, I've gone ahead and have tried to have a stab at implementing the missing functionality myself for fun.
Changes implemented so far in this fork:
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Added the ability to use a file browser to change which directory the images are loaded from (Ctrl-O)
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Change defaults so the window shows the full help image on initial startup (instead of cropping it)
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Default to dark mode
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Improved styling of the slider (based on MCluck90's code) to make it more easily visible
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Show the total number of images found in the current folder, and the index/position of the currently displayed image within that
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When files have invalid EXIF Orientation data, the filename is displayed as part of the error messages for those.
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Attempts to fix a bug where the window always ends up halfway off-screen on startup (i.e. This one https://github.com/ArturKovacs/emulsion/issues/210)
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Additional hotkeys:
i= Toggle usage panel+/-= Zoom in/outCtrl+Scroll Up/Down= Prev/Next Image
Functionality I'd still like to add:
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H/Vto instantly flip the image (and update the file on disk) -
Hotkeys to rotate the image in 90-degree steps
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Ability to rate (or "favourite") the images
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Ability to crop + straighten the image, and/or save the resulting image to disk (with/without overwriting the original)
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Add loading indicator to provide feedback when switching to images that haven't been loaded in the cache yet
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Open containing folder (i.e. launch the system file browser in the containing folder)
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Respect ICC profiles in the image EXIF data
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Ability to check pixel values (RGBA value) while hovering over them (or clicking on them)
- Optionally, the ability to view what each channel looks like (R/G/B/A), for debugging graphics buffers
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Ability to measure distances on the images (either as pixels or in physical units, given a mapping factor or a reference scale) -- This requires the ability to render text
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Panel displaying metadata (e.g. image dimensions, file size, EXIF data, PNG chunk data) -- This probably requires reimplementing with a more advanced toolkit (e.g.
eguioriced), as the current approach doesn't really allow rendering arbitrary text.
-- Aligorith (20211229)
DISCONTINUED I do not plan to work on this project anymore.
Refer to the website for an overview.
Emulsion is targeting Windows, Mac, and Linux although it is currently only being tested on Linux and Windows. A note for Linux users: Wayland support is limited, so for example expect high CPU usage and the title text not being shown. However X is fully supported.
Planned releases are represented with Milestones (under Issues). I try making a new release every other month or so, but don't take the deadline too seriously. If there's a feature or bugfix that's particularly interesting to you, please indicate this at the issue - a reaction like a thumbs up might just be enough but sometimes it's better to leave a comment because that's what I get a notification about.
Contribution is welcome. Feel free to post feature requests, bug reports, and make pull requests.
It is recommended to use the officially provided installer found on the website and at the GitHub releases page. Although there can be a few resons why someone wants to build from source. For this, it's required to have the latest stable release of Rust installed; proceed when that's done.
In many cases it's a good start to try running cargo install emulsion. If that build fails or if emulsion panics on startup, look into the nix-example/emulsion/default.nix file and locate rpathLibs which lists the libraries that emulsion depends on. Install the dev version of those libraries then try running the build/install again. For example on Ubuntu one can install libXi by running
sudo apt install libXi-dev
For the Nix Package Manager users: The Nix expressions found within nix-example is in theory able to build a working executable from a state of the emulsion source code. There is no guarantee that the built executable will be identical to any released version of emulsion. The Nix expression is provided to find the dependencies and for those who like tinkering with Nix but otherwise I advise against using it.
All packages on the website come with avif support, however it is not a default feature as the dependecies are not trivial to set up. If you are bulding from source (eg using cargo install) and would like emulsion to open avif files, I recommend taking a look at the release workflow for steps to install the avif development dependencies.
When installing Emulsion through the Windows installer, Emulsion will have networking enabled and will by default check for updates. However none of the other versions have networking and neither does the default feature-set. This also means that Emulsion will not have networking dependent capabilities when invoking
cargo install emulsion
To enable such features when installing with cargo, run
cargo install emulsion --features=networking
If Emulsion closed unexpectedly please locate the "panic.txt" file. This file has a different location depending on the target platform.
- Windows:
%localappdata%\emulsion\data - MacOS:
$HOME/Library/Application Support/emulsion - Linux:
$XDG_DATA_HOME/emulsionor$HOME/.local/share/emulsion
When posting a bug report please upload the contents of this file to GitHub. If you deem it too large just paste the last panic entry between the rows of equal signs. If there's no "panic.txt" file, describe the scenario in which you experienced the faulty behaviour, and steps to reproduce it if you believe that could help.