Mirage slow to load images – fixes or alternatives

[Member punranger]

Of the pre-installed image viewers in antiX, Mirage has the best functionality for my purposes. I generally want to go to a specific folder, click on the first image there, and browse the images there in sequence in full screen, which Mirage does well.

However, Mirage seems to have some limitations when you run it on older hardware with many and/or large files. In this case, I’m using an old PC for backing up my photo library, running an Intel Core 2 at 1.8 MhZ with 2MB Ram. This isn’t generally a problem, but sometimes my folders contain a large number of images, and my recent photos have grown larger in file size, DSLR jpg’s average around 10 Mb each.

By default, Mirage seems to want to read through every image file to generate a thumbnail. This results in an image taking forever to load when there are many and/or large files in the directory. I tried fiddling with the preferences, but somehow, turning off the preview function meant I could only load a single image, and no longer browse full size images. I checked the Mirage website, and it hasn’t been updated for ten years, so there’s little chance of a fix that way.

Is anyone else here familiar with the issue? I would like to know a fix, preferably by modifying the setting in Mirage. Otherwise, can anyone recommend an alternative simple and lightweight image viewer that works for my purposes?

antiX linux: The best way to revive an old computer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCTaUAP6sSg

[Member Robin]

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punranger wrote:

Is anyone else here familiar with the issue? I would like to know a fix, preferably by modifying the setting in Mirage

Yes. I’m running into the same issue when using it on my 32bit single core CPU.

Simply go to

Menu "Edit" → Preferences → Tab "Navigation"
Deactivate checkbox "Preload images for faster navigation"

Possibly you also want to change the following setting:

Tab "Behaviour"
Deactivate checkbox "Load all images in current folder"

In case you have no dedicated graphics card (weak GPU or shared graphics memory) you could also set

Tab "Image"
set scaling quality to "nearest (fastest)"

• This reply was modified 12 months ago by Robin.

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[Member sybok]

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If you are interested in sequential browsing only (no returning back) of images in a single folder, you could do it as follows
0) open a terminal
1) change directory to the folder where the images are located
cd <path to the directory>
2) run the below command, using the image viewer ‘feh’:
for f in *.jpg; do echo "$f"; feh "$f"; done
If (some of) your images are of a different format than jpg, change/add the extension.
Since Linux is by default case sensitive, you may wish to combine both lowercase and uppercase variants such as:
for f in *.jpg *.JPG *.png *.PNG; do echo "$f"; feh "$f"; done

[Member punranger]

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Robin wrote:

Tab "Behaviour"
Deactivate checkbox "Load all images in current folder"

Thanks for the tips! But when I try the above, I’m not able to browse the directory, which is a shame.

antiX linux: The best way to revive an old computer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCTaUAP6sSg

[Member punranger]

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And thanks to Sybok for a nifty tip, I’ll try that out!

antiX linux: The best way to revive an old computer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCTaUAP6sSg

[Member blur13]

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To follow up on what sybok wrote. In my opinion, an easier way is to use feh with some flags

feh -F --auto-rotate --start-at image1.jpg

for fullscreen, automatically rotated images (using EXIF data) starting with image1. Use left and right arrows to go back and forth. Up and down to zoom. Hold down ctrl to pan using arrow keys. If you find it useful consider adding it as an alias.

[Member PPC]

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Adapting blur13’s tip- you can launch feh from zzzfm or spacefm – right click an image (ex: a .jpg) > Open > Open With > and enter this, on the command box, on the bottom of the window

feh -F --auto-rotate --start-at %u

If you like how it works, you can repeat the steps and check the box on the bottom of the window and says that will be default action for that file type.

The downside of this tip is that you will have to repeat the process for all picture file types ( . gif .bmp etc)

P.

[Member oops]

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Yes FEH is great, light and powxerfull.
Recursively into a directory (key “h” to start/stop the slideshow 1s)

cd /your/DIR/

feh -r -S dirname --cache-size 256 -d --draw-tinted -^ "[e-d-i]h=pause: %n" -N --draw-exif --min-dimension 150x150 --auto-rotate -. -g 800x500+30+30 -C /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/ -e DejaVuSans.ttf/8 --info "echo %m %a h=pause [e-d-i] f '> | ': %wx%h %Ppix %z%% %So _feh V%v" -D -1

[Member blur13]

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oops, that was a cool tip. I really enjoyed it, with the extra info that could be toggled with the e d i keys. But it was rather resource intensive. On my old eeePC the cpu was at about 50% and feh used 350 MiB memory.

[Member oops]

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Hi,
Maybe you can adapt the cache size: –cache-size 256 … to –cache-size 54 ?

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