Simple image editor?

Question

I want something similar to "preview" in macs. For example: I want an image editor that ONLY does simple adjustments like increase/decrease contrast, saturation, exposure, color tinting.... rotate, flip vertically, flip horizontally, make black and white, change size or format, crop.

THATS IT. I know gimp can do all those things but its a bit overkill. I just want to right click an image, open it with this magical program i just described, do a few quick adjustments, and then save and exit. Nothing really fancy.

Anyone know of anything like this? Btw I am using ubuntu 12.04 :) It rocks and I am glad I switched from mac, i just need to replace this one piece of software.

I think gThamb is so simple to use and covers all my demands. It is like ACDSee on windows. Best indeed! — , Apr 20 '14 at 03:54
possible duplicate of Is there a program like Microsoft Paint? — αғsнιη, Aug 17 '14 at 14:46
@KasiyA I would prefer to do it backwards. The other one dupe of this. — Lucio, Aug 17 '14 at 21:28
@KasiyA Neither of these is a dupe of the other--this question is asking for an image editor that is mostly a viewer and stops short of offering drawing tools. — Eliah Kagan, Aug 18 '14 at 00:24
yep, it would also be great to be able to blur/smudge text from screenshots (like account info in some bug reports)... — xealits, Feb 27 '18 at 20:56
This is a good recap of all this kind of software that are available under Ubuntu http://www.upubuntu.com/2011/03/eight-image-editors-you-can-install-and.html — user827992, Jul 16 '12 at 23:27

score 255 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 21 '20 at 21:38

255

Pinta

A very simple image editor.

Pinta is a drawing/editing program modeled on Paint.NET. Its goal is to provide a simplified alternative to the GIMP for casual users.

Features

Its features include:

Adjustments (Auto level, Black and White, Sepia, …)
Effects (Motion blur, Glow, Warp, …)
Multiple layers
Unlimited undo/redo
Drawing tools (Paintbrush, Pencil, Shapes, …)

See the website for the full list.

Another feature of Pinta is full history saving. Say you want to continue a work later on, keeping all the layers intact (so that you can add/remove them later on), you can save the file in .ora format. It preserves every edit you have made so that you can reverse the changes.

Installation

For Ubuntu versions up to 12.04 you need to add a PPA to install this and keep it updated:

Ubuntu 10.10, 11.04 & 11.10

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pinta-maintainers/pinta-stable/ubuntu
 sudo apt-get update

Ubuntu 12.04

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pinta-maintainers/pinta-stable
 sudo apt-get update

Installing via the Terminal

Run this command:

sudo apt-get install pinta

Installing via the Ubuntu Software Center

Launch the Ubuntu Software Center
Search for "pinta"
Click the 'Install' button

Once it is installed you can now use Pinta. Navigate to: Menu > Graphics > Pinta

Screenshots

screenshot including "Adjustments" menu

screenshot including "Effects" menu

sample image with drawings on top of it

edited Oct 21 '20 at 21:38

taper

218

answered Jul 17 '12 at 07:28

Ashu

9,482

2

I have found Pinta's "Crop" function not to work. I select a region of a jpg photo, and the "Crop selection" produces about half the selected area. No idea why. – Carl Witthoft Aug 08 '15 at 20:58
3

pinta is nice, but all those mono dependencies... Shotwell comes with Ubuntu and has a working cropping function, but not much more – Alecz Jun 15 '17 at 13:31
15

Pinta is buggy software. – niry Jan 19 '18 at 00:58
7

In 2016 I think this was the answer, but not anymore. Pinta is not getting new releases and is unusable in on a 4k computer. It's also very buggy. – Bufke Feb 08 '18 at 20:59
Pinta is great for a quick image crop. – chinnychinchin Mar 08 '18 at 19:17
5

Pinta is shit, and I say it because I love Paint.NET which is an archetype for Pinta. It leaves artifacts on screen, does not refresh minimap (layers) properly, does not refresh recently open files submenu. I could go on like this, don't use it or you will get into frustration fast. All bugs I found I got on Debian 9 running Pinta in KDE Plasma. – Marecky Mar 12 '18 at 20:52
1

@Alecz Wait, it depends on Mono? Thanks for the warning, not installing. – Michael Nov 05 '18 at 04:41
PInta always crash ... I can't even draw a simple rectangle in an existing image. – Sabrina Mar 25 '19 at 15:04
Pinta is a terrible program, dont use it, just use Gimp. – Rob May 06 '19 at 19:39
Use apt instad of apt-get. Apt is meant for humans, apt-get is for scripts. – Wax Cage Aug 15 '19 at 16:04
No more under active development – Basil K Y Jan 10 '20 at 14:56
Crashes constantly, which might have been acceptable for OS software 20 years ago but not these days. – Andrew Marshall Sep 30 '20 at 13:22
almost 9 years later and still relevant. nice job! sudo apt install pinta does the trick these days.... – Joshua Besneatte Feb 03 '21 at 03:26
1

I was about to give Pinta a try but the list of libmono garbage that it requires changed my mind. No thanks. – Midwire Jul 06 '21 at 19:19
1

Pinta sucks has nothing to do with mac's Preview that was asked. – DimiDak Nov 11 '21 at 16:22
Pinta crashes with in seconds of basic operation on Ubuntu – jouell Feb 20 '22 at 00:18
I installed the old Pinta 1.6 but indeed this is buggy. So I found the new Pinta 2 which is maintained in Github. There is a how-to to compile it easily: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2023/01/compile-install-pinta-2-1/ which I did it and it work good: fast, lot of functions and stable as I tested. There is also a snap to install: sudo snap install pinta which makes it even easier to install. But indeed you need the dot.net package. – franc Mar 10 '23 at 10:41
I want something smaller than pinta (the gnome icon theme dependency is causing me this error message on install: E: Failed to fetch http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gnome-icon-theme/gnome-icon-theme_3.12.0-4_all.deb) – Moberg Nov 09 '23 at 17:40
it crashes when I am working on an image! – Benyamin Jafari Jan 09 '24 at 11:36

score 76 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 20 '14 at 19:16

76

Shotwell has a single photo view that allows you to do most if not all of what you're asking. Shotwell, of course, has the advantage that it's included by default in modern Ubuntu so there's nothing to install.

To access the Shotwell viewer without separately launching the main Shotwell app, right click the photo and from the Open With menu select Shotwell Photo Viewer:

Right click, Open With -> Shotwell Photo Viewer

(You can make the Shotwell viewer the default program to open photos by selecting Properties from the right click menu and messing around in the Open With tab there.)

From the Shotwell viewer, you can rotate, crop, manipulate color levels, etc., and simply save the file when you're done. You can see the tools at the bottom of the window here:

Shotwell Photo Viewer

Whereas usually Shotwell is nondestructive (in the sense that any manipulations you perform on photos are only saved to a photo file if you export it), hitting save from the viewer does indeed write the changes to the file.

Full disclosure: I work at Yorba, though not on Shotwell.

edited Oct 20 '14 at 19:16

αғsнιη

35,660

answered Jul 17 '12 at 00:24

chazomaticus

1,253

9

One thing you can't seem to do with shotwell is resize images, which seems like a rather glaring omission IMHO. – Martin Tournoij Oct 21 '15 at 14:37
2

I've used Shotwell extensively, and I think its crap. Doesn't even properly rotate images to even be recognized by other image softwares – KhoPhi Nov 16 '15 at 14:40
1

@Rexford, you may just be hitting bugs in your other image software. Shotwell properly handles the EXIF rotation field, and uses it instead of any pixel/buffer manipulation when rotating. – chazomaticus Jun 03 '16 at 04:40
Ubuntu installation:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yg-jensge/shotwell
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install shotwell – 88mary256 Dec 20 '16 at 22:13
3

Shotwell can't remove/blur/color a portion of the image – Anwar Dec 16 '17 at 08:29
1

Although this seems to be the closest to mac's preview it doesn't let you draw on the pic which is the most important. E.g circle/mark something. – DimiDak Nov 11 '21 at 16:26
Thank you for posting this. I had tried Shotwell because it was already on my work machine, but I didn't find any editing ability (probably because of my dark theme and fullscreen Alacritty window). – Bruno Bronosky Jan 25 '22 at 22:24

score 38 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 27 '23 at 07:39

38

GThumb

GThumb is a really nice image viewer with basic editing tools such as:

Crop
Rotate
Equalize
Change Contrast
Change Focus
Change Colors
Apply basic effects (Grayscale, Negative, etc.)

Installation:

sudo apt-get install -y gthumb

Screenshots:

Click to view them in high quality

edited Mar 27 '23 at 07:39

brasofilo

192
2
14

answered Oct 30 '16 at 21:54

Sheharyar

1,238

1

Screenshots are out-of-date. It's more user friendly now. – Aleksandr Dubinsky Feb 24 '20 at 19:39
2

The hits the sweet spot for me: has everything I need and nothing I don't, and a very nice interface interface besides. Using it on Manjero. – Shon Feb 07 '21 at 17:32
This is exactly what I was looking for. It keeps it simple enough – Alessandro Oct 03 '22 at 08:07

score 21 · Answer 4 · edited Aug 14 '22 at 13:46

21

You might like gThumb. It can do all that you mentioned and little else.

edited Aug 14 '22 at 13:46

Franklin Yu

113

answered Jul 16 '12 at 23:42

xjonquilx

1,487

I could not save an image from clipboard – Oliver Apr 13 '21 at 13:39
I love that it is part of the GNOME project! Blends very well into the GNOME shell. – Franklin Yu Aug 13 '22 at 00:40

score 18 · Answer 5 · 2012-07-30T10:11:39.650

18

I would try Pinta (it's in the repos), as it is simple and has all the necessary basic adjustments to do with contrast, brightness, etc, and even has layers functionality. It is ideal for a quick crop, resize or red eye correction. The version in the repos is 1.1, but you can use a ppa from the developers if you want to have a more recent version-see the notes on the site about whether to use the ppa or not. However, the default version is fine and is very useful for those quick corrections. As you can see in the screenshot below the interface is easy to navigate and simple and intuitive to use.

enter image description here

edited Jul 30 '12 at 10:11

answered Jul 17 '12 at 00:25

doesn't even open pgm files.... – Mehdi Jan 29 '16 at 13:04
Pinta works well for me. Crops, rectangle selects, blurs. – pwned Oct 07 '18 at 07:45
And crashed several times for me. – Seyed Morteza Mousavi Dec 26 '20 at 12:00
Pinta crashed for me ten seconds into use – Joseph Garvin Jul 19 '21 at 02:35

Marty Fried · Answer 6 · 2014-09-06T17:25:13.697

4

I was just looking for something similar. I've found some candidates on Wikipedia, and I'm about to check some out.

A few I've found so far are: Shotwell, fotoxx, and the already-mentioned gthumb. I don't know yet which ones are in the Ubuntu repository.

EDIT: I have been using Shotwell now for a long time, and find that it does most of what I want, very quickly and easily. When it doesn't, it can directly open a full editor such as GIMP quickly to do the job instead.

I especially like that it can easily resize images, something I do a lot.

edited Sep 06 '14 at 17:25

answered Jul 17 '12 at 00:13

Marty Fried

18,466

2

pinta throws 'unhandled exception' on 14.04 when trying to crop image. :) Shutter just halts the whole system. Only button hard reset helps. Only Shotwell works for me. Shutter was extremly cool. – Capacytron Jul 25 '15 at 20:51
@Sergey: I'm still using shotwell after all these years, and if I need more, I use gimp. I'm pretty familiar with gimp now, so even though it's overkill, I like it because it does just about everything. – Marty Fried Jul 25 '15 at 21:43

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 07 '21 at 00:42

1

I include MTPaint in my options as it will open suspect .bmp files from my Chinese Digital Storage Oscilloscope. It is very compact and very close to what Paint users would expect.

If you have kids under 5, start them on Tuxpaint.

answered Feb 07 '21 at 00:42

mckenzm

355
2
11