Loupe is GNOME’s default image viewer since GNOME 45. It is powered by the newly written safe image loading and editing library glycin.

What’s new in 47

With GNOME 47, Loupe version 47 is available as well. This release mostly consists of a lot of subtle changes. For JPEGs, the image rotation feature now writes the new orientation to the image file. While Loupe 46 was still defaulting to an older GTK renderer, the new version is using the same defaults as all other apps. Thanks to work by Benjamin Otte in GTK, Loupe now also handles very large images (larger than 256 megapixels) reliably on systems with limited VRAM while also increasing the loading speed.

Loupe and the underlying image loading and editing library glycin now support much better error reporting if it is not possible to load an image. The new glycin version uses a different decoder for JPEG images, improving loading speed and fixing all known compatibility issues. As part of my work on the GNOME STF grant, glycin now also provides bindings for other programming languages than Rust including C, GJS, Python, and Vala. If necessary, glycin now automatically disables its sandbox features in Flatpak development environments, simplifying development.

What we are working on

But there is more! We have already merged the first GNOME 48 features, which will be released in March 2025. Allan Day worked on a new design for overlay controls, especially zoom. This is already implemented and merged. It allows the selection of zoom levels like 100% without using keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+1 and additionally gives the option to select arbitrary zoom levels. There is also a new experimental design for dragging images into the Loupe window.

On the more technical side, Hubert Figuière has written an initial loader implementation for raw image formats which is now merged into glycin. Last but not least, I’m planning to finally have some initial image editing features beyond image rotation in Loupe 48. I’m currently working on all the basics and an image cropping feature.

A huge thanks goes out to everyone who contributed to this work including all the people that are kind enough to support my work financially! If you want to get weekly behind-the-scenes development updates or just support my work financially, you can do so via Patreon, Ko-Fi, GitHub, or OpenCollective.

Header Image © Friedrich Haag / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0