KaniView

KaniView is an image viewer whose goal is to display images in the fastest, cleanest, and most straightforward way possible. There's also playback controls for animated images (e.g. .gifs), which seems to be lacking in almost all image viewers.

File formats can be added with "plugins", the code for all the default plugins is included.

KaniView is for viewing images, not for modifying them.

Current status

KaniView is split into 2 parts, the main program, and the file format plugins.

The main program is mostly done, a few things remain before I would consider it finished:

• No settings for configuring anything (UI colors, fonts, behavior...)
• Missing ability to flip/rotate the image.
• The way the image is rendered is somewhat stupid/inflexible, for that reason I can't rotate the image or draw a border around it cleanly, and it's unnecessarily slow if you make the window big (the whole canvas is always re-drawn, not just the image).

There's also other less important things that could be done:

• Can't sort files or filter file types (for the next/prev file switcher buttons). This is implemented internally, but there's no UI to control it.
• There may in theory be crashes when opening/switching files or when zooming out because the multithreading is half assed. I haven't experienced any problems though.
• Switching to next/previous file could be sped up by pre-loading adjacent files in the background. This would increase memory usage though, so it's a tradeoff that would require a setting.

The file format plugins are very lacking, I hate spending time configuring and learning third party libraries and file formats so I mostly haven't done it.

• New and unusual formats (JXL/AVIF/WEBP/ICO/CUR/SVG) use a workaround that only works if ImageMagick is installed, but even then they don't animate and may not work if there's non-ASCII characters in the name. ANI is not supported at all.
• Non-GIF images that are very large or use unusual features will not work due to limitations in the decoding library.
• I rarely encounter GIF images that show incorrect flickering pixels. This is most likely due to a faulty copy pasted LZW decompression algorithm, I have 0 interest in LZW so I have no motivation to procure a proper one.
• Some animated PNGs may not work correctly. All the images I've tested work, but it's hard to test the decoder because there aren't a lot of APNG files out there.

Linux version may happen some day.

Mac version not planned.

Download

Report bugs/problems or request features: find my contact here.