Loupe
The image viewer built into GNOME desktops. Opens photos instantly and does quick crops and rotations.
Our verdict
Loupe is the window that appears when you double-click a photo on a current GNOME desktop. It is fast, it is quiet, and it is already installed, which is most of what people want from a picture viewer.
Compared with the Windows Photos app it is deliberately smaller. You get viewing, zooming, arrow-key browsing through a folder, and a crop or rotate when a shot came out sideways. It also shows the camera information buried in the file.
What it does not do is organise. There is no library that gathers every photo on the machine, no albums and no search by face. If that side of Photos mattered to you, pair this with a proper photo manager and let Loupe handle the everyday double-click.
What's good
- Already installed on Ubuntu and Fedora, so double-clicking a photo just works
- Opens large photos quickly and lets you flick through a folder with the arrow keys
- Crop, rotate and flip without opening a full photo editor
- Shows the camera details stored in the file, such as date and shutter speed
What to know first
- No photo library, no albums and no face tagging, so it will not replace the Windows Photos app in full
- No editing beyond crop and rotate, and no red-eye or colour correction
- Cannot make a slideshow or a video from your pictures
- Shown in menus as Image Viewer rather than Loupe, which makes it hard to search for
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (GPL-3.0-or-later)
- How you install it
- App store (Flatpak), .deb installer, .rpm installer, Built-in app store
Windows apps it can replace
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