What is the fastest way to view images from the terminal?

The terminal is very fast and convenient way to quickly access directories and files (faster than find and click on the directory). One thing that it cannot show in text-mode is "pictures". What is a best way to view pictures (like you see images thumbnail in Nautilus) when you are working in the terminal (e.g. command nautilus or any program - but should be fast and convenient)?

I just run a terminal emulator under my desktop enviroment. So you have the advantages of both at hand.

Gotta object to the close votes here as there is a substantial difference between the need to view images files from a (presumably GUI) terminal (this question) and the need to view them on the console (the other question).

I provide a list of pretty much all your options here in this Q&A: How to get JPEG thumbnails quickly

33 Answers 33

The way to "double-click" on a file from the command line is xdg-open .

If you're on Gnome (probably, if you're using Nautilus), you can use eog directly, or any other image program ( feh is quite good).

If you want to consult image-name file easilly.

@Searene Yeah! Long life to feh . But I observe that feh has no zoom or any other function whatsoever. eog , however, is also lightweight and, in addition, it can zoom, rotate and browse the images in a folder :). Just for the people to know before they make a choice.

although eog is preinstalled in my ubuntu os, I still prefer feh coz it can be closed by q while eog and xdg-open can be closed by esc .

@pikachuchameleon you'll need to set up an X11 environment and forwarding. Have a look at these instructions

If you happen to have installed imagemagick, you can use its very handy display command-line tool.

display path/to/picture.png 

I personally prefer feh , but display is usually installed on web servers, where feh or other image browsers aren't installed.

display works great on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop and also on stock Raspbian. No installs required. TNX from 2017

to install imagemagick, sudo apt install imagemagick-6.q16hdri , I used it to open .ppm file, display path/to/file.ppm

Display can be fast, but often is not. My benchmark results: display averages 25925ms. feh averages 19.9ms.

I usually run python -m http.server 8080 (in python2: python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080 ) from a folder containing the image and view it from the browser at localhost:8080/path/to/image.jpg. Works great to browse and look at different image and text files in that same directory.

Edit: This method also works for remote boxes. Just run the python server as above, and if the ports are open you can connect to myserver.com:8080/path/to/image.jpg. If the server does not expose ports, you can set up an ssh tunnel with ssh [email protected] -N -L localhost:8080:localhost:8080 and then view the images from your local browser at localhost:8080/path/to/image.jpg. Note this http interface is much faster than ssh -X.

Clever! Works like a charm and there's no need to type /path/to/image.jpg . Just open localhost:8080 and click on the filenames.

Regarding the last paragraph, you can also add tunnels easily using PuTTY configuration! Then you can access it through a browser. Awesome!

I have created a tool that uses various unicode block graphics characters to improve the resolution (compared to the canonical 2 pixel per characterapproach taken by other solutions posted here). It also automatically displays images in a thumbnail mode if multiple images are provided as input.

git clone https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer.git cd TerminalImageViewer/src/main/cpp make sudo make install 

Not sure why the downvote, guess because of self-promotion? I think it's the best tool for the job though and the question is still relevant today.

It's a pity it doesn't work with apt install . Perhaps time to make a ppa? In any case, this package worked for me, while none of the others did (perhaps I used them in a wrong way). I needed to be able to view images in terminal (for instance, when I'm inside a Docker container) and not to call an image viewer from terminal. Thank you for your answer and I can only thank you more for creating this small, but valuable package!

a snap will be easier for everybody: no ppa to setup for you, no ppa to add for the user -> snapcraft.io

No dependencies, one C file, one header file: imcat

Works on linux, macos, windows. Automatically scales to terminal width, with quality down-sampling.

Because it is a repository on github. clone the repository on your PC and type 'make' in the folder, that you have downloaded

@SridharSarnobat For now you can build from source, or get a pre compiled package using apt if you use my PPA.

Thanks for the response. Hmmmm, I'm having some issues with your repos getting ignored even when I use sudo apt-get update --allow-insecure-repositories . But I was able to build from source (I wish all build from sources were this easy!). I'll have to see whether it causes memory leaks like iTerm's image viewer. Thank you for creating this.

I guess feh would be the one you are looking for.

Although popping out a terminal-like window for picture display as mplayer does for video playing, Feh is still considered as a terminal-based picture viewer due to its command-intensive control style.

If you're in pure terminal with framebuffer activated, I'd recommend fbi. It's always in my after-install to do list.

Otherwise, eog is the default picture opener in Gnome, as Kevin mentioned. Also, Shotwell seems to open pretty fast for me. I'm pretty sure there are hundreds. :-)

Thanks for this one - it's news to me. As an aside, googling lands me at fim's (self-styled framebuffer image viewer improved ) manpage only a few search results in. Dont know yet the difference.

If you're on OS X, iTerm 2 supports displaying inline images:

As you can imagine, this can be highly useful when you just want to display an image without going in and opening up Preview.app or having to open the Finder to the image and hitting spacebar on the image.

The feature is documented at iTerm2's feature page

Surprised that the Terminology terminal emulator is not among the answers. As easy as tyls and then clicking on an image:

or someting like tycat image.png , for example:

Plus a lot more. An old video, almost 3 years ago, demonstrating Terminology 0.3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibPziLRGvkg#action=share.

If you need to view a single known image, tacat or typop are preferred. First one will embed image into terminal output, second will show it in popup window.

No real benchmark, but ls -l rekx_draft_logo_72dpi.png : .. 136914 and file rekx_draft_logo_72dpi.png : rekx_draft_logo_72dpi.png: PNG image data, 500 x 500, 16-bit/color RGBA, interlaced . With time tycat rekx_draft_logo_72dpi.png it takes real 0m0,027s, user 0m0,008s, sys 0m0,016s .

The kitty terminal can display inside the terminal with the icat "kitten"

kitty +kitten icat /path/to/image

The kitty documentation suggests creating an alias, e.g.

alias icat="kitty +kitten icat"

So that then you can simply do:

Could you please benchmark this so we can compare and see which method is the fastest? The usertime reported by the time should work here.

w3m's imgdisplay library is able to display images directly. It only works on some terminal emulators such as Xterm and URxvt.

ranger is a file browser that makes use of the library to display previews. Add this to ranger's configuration file to enable the feature:

set preview_images true 

From the terminal? Why not in the terminal: cacaview might be the fastest. By default it's fastest if the terminal has no graphics.

In Debian: sudo apt-get install caca-utils

Actually, there is a way to show a PNG file in a terminal in text-mode, using picture-tube:

You can look at the project on GitHub.

The image is of course an approximation of the actual image, given the fact that the smallest pixel is a character - try to have a look at the result in a text editor, you will see a huge number of color codes.

You can install the tool like this (assuming you have already installed node/npm): npm install -g picture-tube

There is a tool here called catimg that works really well:

Another great terminal-based picture viewer is fim, which is a improved fbi with a vim-like control system.

I tried this. It opens a separate X window over SSH in case anyone's wondering. What would be ideal for me is an inline terminal display that works over SSH but I don't think there is a good one.

The Ranger file manager enabling the image-preview in settings.

and ranger appears to launch another program, it may work with inline, but I see it running the default image viewer: feh or imageviewer

In linux you can install gnome-open.

# In Debian flavors sudo apt-get install gnome-open 

Then create an alias:

alias open='gnome-open' 

open file.pdf open file.jpg etc 

This is a 4 year-old-question but I found that people still look at it. So, today I would like to answer my own question specifically only for iTerm2 .

At first time I asked this question. The term of "fastest" I was thinking of viewing image as fast as cat command displaying text. So, today I found the answer on iTerm2 , which are the two handy commands name imgcat and imgls .

To use them, the first let's install iterm2-nigthly :

$ brew cask install iterm2-nightly 

then visit the website:

and install imgcat and imgls commands:

$ go install github.com/olivere/iterm2-imagetools/cmd/imgcat $ go install github.com/olivere/iterm2-imagetools/cmd/imgls 

So, I really love them and also hope this will be useful for you all!

This is very useful, so thanks for answering this 4 years later. Works like a charm, but might want to include the install go step ( brew install go ) for those that don't have it yet.

@jamescampbell, you don't need to install go to get the imgcat and imgls scripts. They're provided to you by iTerm's developer himself here: iterm2.com/documentation-images.html, and these are bash scripts.

You can also use chafa (on GitHub). It has a gallery with plenty of examples, showing different options. It even supports animated GIFs.

pxl is a pretty cool option which hasn't been mentioned yet. Similar to picture-tube which was previously posted in that it shows the image directly in the terminal although it supports more image formats.

I just use the Chrome webrowser, which supports jpg , svg , png , ico , animated gif . basically everything I'm likely to need:

google-chrome ./myphoto.jpg 

If you prefer Firefox:

firefox ./myphoto.jpg 

Fast, convenient, and easy to use.

$ img2sixel

To install (ubuntu 18.04):

$ sudo apt install libsixel-bin 

Example (scaled down to 400 pixels wide with -w 400):

There's a list of terminal requirements in the link, but it's worked with any terminal I've tried it on. I won't bother listing all the supported terminals, but here are some:

DEC VT series, VT240/VT241/VT330/VT340/VT282/VT284/VT286/VT382

DECterm(dxterm)

Kermit

ZSTEM 340

WRQ Reflection

RLogin

mlterm

Works on each of X, WIN32 GDI, framebuffer, Android, Cocoa version.

XTerm (compiled with --enable-sixel-graphics option)

yaft

Mintty (>= 2.6.0)

If you have any relatively recent version of ImageMagick, you can output images to any terminal emulator that supports the SIXEL format. This is different from the ImageMagick display command, as the latter requires an X11 session and spawns a separate window, while the former works with any supported terminal, even over SSH. The following command takes an input image, converts it to a SIXEL image, and outputs it to stdout so the terminal emulator can render it:

convert input.png six:- 

_{Sample image: Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

I just found this page, and it is still very relevant today. OP didn't really specify if they want X or fb viewer.

Needs X, so call from command line in a terminal window. Views many picture formats, gif and jpg for sure. some others as well.

Can do wildcard globbing from command line: eg. "$ pho img00. jpg" will view all files that match in order. Space goes forward through list and backspace goes back. Its quick loading individual images -- hold down space and you fly through them.

Very fast if you want to look through a bunch of pictures, flag ones of interest, rotate, delete unwanted. I keep coming back to it.

From the web page above:

pho (pronounced like the first syllable in "photo") is a lightweight program for viewing large numbers of images quickly, rotating or deleting some, and making notes about what to do with each image -- for instance, for going through hundreds of images after uploading them from a digital camera.

Even tough there are great answers given, my issue was to view images in terminal itself, without openning any graphical application, so i wrote my own little script. I only needed to identify the image and did not need al the details of it and did not want to download any relatively big packet, if anyone needs they can also use it: https://github.com/Deniz97/terminal-image-viewer

I have a shell alias for macOS called preview that can (1) display an image inline ( -i or --inline option), either from stdin or specified filepath(s), and (2) just open an image in Apple's Preview app (without any option), the latter also either from stdin or filepath(s), e.g.:

cat image.jpg | preview

preview -i image.png

Inline display only works with the iTerm imgcat alias, so you need iTerm installed, running, and frontmost. But preview checks if all that is true.

To determine the fastest, we must measure the time. Here are my times for opening and displaying a 700x500 pixel png benchmark image. I took 10 samples for each program. I'm using Ubuntu22.04 from Win11/WSLg with a 12th Gen Intel core i7-12800H. All times are in milliseconds.

What is a best way to view pictures (like you see images thumbnail in Nautilus) when you are working in the terminal [. ] ?

This part of the question about previewing multiple images at once has not yet been addressed properly. Most image viewers (with the exception of TerminalImageViewer) will not show multiple thumbnails when called with multiple image files. They might display them in a slideshow, which is not always practical (e.g. when browsing through icons).

As a solution, I use a usual file manager in "thumbnail" mode to display all images that I copied to a temporary directory. For example, to display all icons from the KDE icon theme "Breeze" where the filename matches *search* :

tmpdir=$(mktemp -d -t image-previews-XXXXX) find /usr/share/icons/breeze -name "*search*" -exec \ bash -c ' tmpdir=$1; file=$2; newfile=$; newfile=$; cp $file $tmpdir/$newfile ' _ $tmpdir <> \; pcmanfm-qt $tmpdir 

Discussion

This find s and copies all Breeze icons matching *search* to a temporary directory, replacing the path relative to the Breeze installation directory with a filename that has - instead of the directory separator / . This way, the files are all in one directory for previewing, and won't overwrite each other.

Then this starts a file manager (here pcmanfm-qt ) to show the files in the temporary directory. After it starts, it has to be manually set to thumbnail view for best results. Unlike other image viewers, file managers usually can render SVGs into preview thumbnails.

The find command uses a technique with positional parameters in a subshell to allow executing multiple commands in find including variable evaluation, as documented here.