Glimpse for Ubuntu and GNOME

Glimpse Media Viewer

Open any file and everything in its folder is ready to browse, with thumbnails, tags and cover art. View pictures and camera RAW files, play videos and music, tag and rate photos, and tidy them up, all in one friendly window.

Install it See what it does

FreeNo advertsUbuntu 24.04 and newerGPL v3

What it does

View

Thumbnails of every image and video, and cover art for songs
Four views: List, Details, Compact and Thumbnails (a grid you can make bigger or smaller)
Zoom with buttons, keyboard, Ctrl+scroll or a pinch, and drag to pan
JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, TIFF, SVG, GIF and many more, plus camera RAW from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax and Adobe DNG
Full screen with controls that slide up when needed; Browse shows the folder as big thumbnails; a filmstrip under the picture
Star ratings kept in the picture as the standard XMP rating, and a map button for where a photo was taken

Play

Videos play right in the window: MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, MPEG and many more, with H.264, HEVC, VP9 and other codecs
Music shows its title, artist, album and cover: MP3, FLAC, Ogg, Opus, AAC, M4B audiobooks, WAV and more
A folder of songs plays straight through, like an album
Subtitles menu (the video's own, or a file beside it) and an Audio menu for several sound tracks; your choices carry on to the next video
Bookmarks in videos and songs, and, with ffmpeg, save a clip, a turned video, a video without its sound or a single frame

Search and tag

Search every pinned folder and its subfolders at once, even large libraries on external drives
Find by part of a name, by type, by date taken or modified, and by tag; combine them and watch the count as you type
Add, rename and remove tags on one image or many; saved as standard XMP and IPTC keywords that darktable, digiKam and Shotwell can read

Info and Tools

Everything about the file beside the picture: name, dates, size, camera, a song's tags, a video's codecs; edit the name, tags and a song's details right there
Adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure, warmth and sharpness, and turn or flip, seeing the result as you go
Auto Adjust, Vibrance, White Balance, Levels, Straighten, Perspective, Noise Reduction and Red Eye
Filters (Black & White, Sepia, Vintage, Cool, Warm, Vivid and more), Crop with shapes, and Capture a boxed part as a new picture
Merge pictures side by side, stacked, in a grid, or blended; save a copy or over the original, keeping camera details and tags
Search Online for a song's tags and cover: AcoustID, iTunes, Deezer, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia

Organise

The Organiser: three folders beside the picture, as thumbnails, a list or a tree; drag files between them, hold Ctrl to copy
Pin favourite folders to the sidebar and drag files onto them, with Undo and Alt+1 to 9 quick-move keys
Copy, move, rename and delete several files at once, to the Trash or for good
Set any picture as your wallpaper

Playlists

Music, video and picture playlists beside the picture; make one from selected files or by dragging
Play in order or shuffled; a picture playlist plays as a slideshow
A music playlist plays on while you browse other folders
Saved as standard .m3u8 files that Rhythmbox, VLC and Celluloid open too

A closer look

Info and Tools beside a picture: its details and tags above, and adjustments below

The Organiser beside the picture: three folders at once, as a tree, thumbnails and a list

Playlists beside a picture, with a music playlist playing

Info and Tools beside a picture: its details above, and the Adjust panel with Auto Adjust, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Vibrance and Exposure below

A video playing in the window, with its details and playback controls in Info and Tools

Install it

For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and newer. Open a Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T), paste these lines one at a time and press Enter. The first two add the Glimpse software source; the last installs the app. apt fetches everything it needs from Ubuntu itself, and updates come with your normal Ubuntu updates.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:turone/glimpse
sudo apt update
sudo apt install glimpse-media-viewer

To remove it: sudo apt remove glimpse-media-viewer. The software source is the Glimpse PPA on Launchpad, which has all four Glimpse apps.

The code is open: launchpad.net/glimpse-media-viewer. Problems and ideas go there too, or to [email protected].

Designed by Salvatore Turone and written with the help of Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool: the ideas, design and testing are his; Claude wrote most of the code.

Glimpse Media Viewer

What it does

View