If you were to look up Loupe’s repository on GitLab, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is just a hum-drum image viewer. And, considering the one you’re using right now works just fine, why would you actually bother trying it, right? Well, not really.
As it happens, there’s a bit more to this image viewer.
Loupe (named after a small magnifying glass, you know, those used by jewelers and watchmakers) is part of the GNOME incubator project. Why is this important? Well, because, Loupe is currently under consideration for inclusion in the GNOME universe, as a GNOME core app.
In short, it might (or might not, time will tell) end up replacing the trusty Eye of GNOME app that, let’s face it, even though it works like a charm, it’s getting old by now.
It’s written with GTK4 and is built using Rust, and it’s now available on Flathub (meaning, everyone can get their hands on it and see for themselves if it’s worth the hype or not).
Since it could potentially be a replacement for Eye of GNOME, means that we can’t shrug off Loupe as being “just a normal image viewer.” Let’s look at the facts.
One of Loupe’s biggest advantages is the way it looks. It has a minimal UI that looks modern and feels good to use. Another very good thing is the fact that it boasts support for a lot more image formats than its potential predecessor. It handles the usual PNG, WEBP, SVG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP formats, as well as some more unusual ones such as HEIF, AVIF, ICO, and EXR. It’s also decently adept at displaying images with transparency, as we’ve found out.
It also features clipboard support, as well as touchpad gestures (which include two-finger swipe, zoom, pinch, and so forth).
On the flip side, (and this should be taken with a grain of salt), during our testing (and no, we haven’t tested it on all GNOME-based distros, just Ubuntu), we’ve discovered that some formats are not rendered properly, as there was some lack in “crispness” when it comes to displaying WEBP and EXR images.
Considering that the app is still in the early stages of development, this is by no means the end of the world, and it’s for sure understandable. In short, nothing that can’t be sorted with time.
Loupe makes a decent first impression. It looks and feels modern, the image loading times are snappy (even though there’s a transition animation each time you open an image), and the fact that it can handle a lot of image formats is a definitive plus.
Is it perfect? Right now, probably not. Will it become the next default image viewer for GNOME? Only time will tell, but we hope that it will.
