Loupe (aka Image Viewer) is GNOME’s modern successor to the venerable Eye of GNOME has picked up its first batch of image editing features.

The features in question were only recently merged upstream, aren’t finished, and not yet included in a stable build. But they’re an interesting addition that furthers the likelihood that Loupe could become the default image viewer on Ubuntu.

At present, Ubuntu continues to use Eye of GNOME as the default tool for opening and browsing image files on desktop, despite Loupe having officially replaced it upstream in the GNOME project as a GNOME Core app.

Loupe serves as a a solid replacement for Eye of GNOME thanks to its GPU-accelerated image rendering, superior SVG handling, touchscreen/touchpad gestures, metadata parsing and presentation, and (of course) the fact it’s UI is GTK4/libadwaita.

Eye of GNOME image viewer and Loupe Image viewer apps for Linux side by side showing image file metadata/properties
Similar, but different – Eye of GNOME (left), and Loupe (right)

Ubuntu has held off switching to it because …Well, I’m not entirely sure! The distro was quick to adopt Snapshot (replaced Cheese), and Text Editor (replaced Gedit), but Loupe has to date been passed over.

Ubuntu users are often advised to install full-blown graphics software like GIMP when asking how to crop a selfie, or end up in a tussle with a pushy photo manager1 like Shotwell simply to bump the brightness of a single a low-light snap to make the content legible.

Adding simple image editing tools to the default image viewer app would certainly meet users where their execrations are. Basic editing features like cropping, mirroring, and basic colour adjustments are common in Android and iOS image viewing apps.

Why not on the desktop too?

Thankfully, GNOME developers are hard at work on doing that.

Loupe Loops in Simple Image Editing

Loupe’s new WIP editing tools (screenshot: Sophie Herold)

In an issue on the GNOME Design Gitlab you can see ample mockups of possible UI and UX approaches for adding an array of of image editing features, including cropping, flipping, rotation, annotations, and basic colour correction.

Mockups aren’t tangible, code is.

Over the past few months the chief developer of Loupe (and the underlying Glycin image decoding library) Sophie Herold has introduced a small set of editing features (all WIP) accessed via a dedicated editing screen:

  • Crop with presets and on-screen controls
  • Rotate clockwise and counterclockwise2
  • Flip aka mirroring, both vertical and horizontal

For now, these actions only work on PNG images. Support for editing JPEGs is “in the works“. Hopefully other image formats, like WEBP and HEIC, follow in time.

Coming in GNOME 48 – and Ubuntu 25.04?

In time, more advanced editing tools may follow

As this is all WIP everything seen and mentioned here is subject to change. If all goes well, these new image editing features should find their way in to the next major update to Loupe released as part of GNOME 48 in the spring.

Of course, it doesn’t strictly matter if or when Ubuntu chooses to switch to Loupe since it is free, open-source software. The app is packaged in the Ubuntu repos (sudo apt install loupe), or you can get Loupe on Flathub.

  1. Pushy in the sense Shotwell is designed to order, group, tag, and copy images (it’s a manager, not a viewer), which puts people off – despite its own built-in image viewer being superior to Eye of GNOME (but it can’t be installed on its own). ↩︎
  2. Older versions of Loupe already support image rotation but with these changes they move from the hamburger menu to the edit canvas. ↩︎