Photos is a new(ish) image viewer and organiser for KDE Plasma aiming to give Gwenview a run for its pixels.
Linux distributions that use KDE Plasma typically ship Gwenview, which has been the KDE image app for over 25 years. It’s a solid, feature-filled and Qt-based tool that and many love and rely on to view, manage and edit images.
But development on Gwenview has slowed – and its legacy could be to blame.
As GNOME found during efforts to modernise the Evince document viewer, updating old software can require rewriting and rewiring large chunks of an antiquated codebase. It is often easier to start over or rip out large chunks than diligently unpick and retrofit.
Papers was the result of that effort, and the improvements and modern approaches that make it a solid Linux PDF viewer have, in turn, been of use in other apps’ modernisation efforts, like GNOME Sushi v51.
In Gwenview‘s case, KDE’s Nate Graham mentioned its performance issues with large image libraries, GPU acceleration quirks and, as mentioned, a crusty codebase that makes it hard for would-be newcomers to get to grips with, much less build on.
“Contributions of features, bug fixes, and UI improvements to Gwenview have dried up in recent years”, Graham said in a blog post introducing Photos, suggesting that “Gwenview’s technical architecture has reached the limit of what people are willing to do with it”.
And lo, a new Photos app for KDE was (re)born.
Koko – it uses Photos for its user-facing label – has its roots in 2017, where it began as a mobile app. Desktop mode and more features followed. Recently, Techpaladin Software, of which Nate Graham is CEO, sponsored efforts to bring the app up to par with Gwenview.
Last week, it achieved it.
It looks cleaner and relatively straightforward at first glance, and offers:
- Faster performance with large photo libraries
- Better HiDPI screen handling
- Adaptive UI for mobile or desktop
- Annotation tools using Spectacle
- Views: Timeline, location, show all
Will it replace Gwenview? Nate Graham is encouraging users to test it out and inviting KDE-based Linux distributions to switch to it. But to rival Gwenview in longevity, it’ll also need active, ongoing maintenance.
If you fancy testing it out, and seeing if can match Gwenview in what can do, you can get Photos on Flathub (a KDE runtime is pulled in if it’s the first Qt/KDE app you install from Flathub) or another way via the KDE Store.