10.1 General Options

This section describes the options presented under the General Tab of the options dialog.

Initial directory

On startup, change to this folder: Enabling this will cause GQview to initially open to the specified folder.

Use Current: Activate this button to change the setting to the current folder.

Thumbnails

Size: Selects the size of the thumbnails displayed throughout GQview, dimensions are width by height in pixels.

Quality: Selects the method to use when scaling an image down for thumbnails.

Nearest: Fastest scaler, but results in poor thumbnail quality.
Tiles: Thumbnail results are very close to bilinear, with better speed.
Bilinear: High quality results, moderately fast.
Hyper: Slowest scaler, sometimes gives better results than bilinear.

Cache thumbnails: Enable this to save thumbnails to disk, subsequent requests for a thumbnail will be faster. Thumbnails are cached into ($HOME)/.gqview/thumbnails. Refer to 11.3 thumbnails for details.

Clear cache button: This will remove all cached thumbnails stored in the user's home folder located at ($HOME)/.gqview/thumbnails.

Cache thumbnails into .thumbnails: When enabled, GQview attempts to store cached thumbnails closer to the source image. This way multiple users can benefit from a single cache, thereby reducing wasted disk space. The resulting location is the source image's folder, in a sub folder with the name .thumbnails. When the image source folder cannot be written, GQview falls back to saving the thumbnail in the user's home folder.

Use xvpics thumbnails when found: xvpics is a common thumbnail caching format used by several applications. Thumbnails are stored locally to the source image in a sub folder with the name .xvpics. Enabling this option will allow GQview to read thumbnails saved in the xvpics format.

Note: Support for xvpics is read only, GQview can not generate thumbnails in this format.

Slide show

Delay before image change: Specifies the delay between images for slide shows, in seconds.

Random: When enabled, slide show images will appear in random order.

Note: Random images are displayed such that each image appears once per cycle of all images. When the slide show repeat option is enabled, the image order is randomized after completing each cycle.

Repeat: When enabled, slide shows will continue at the beginning after the last image is displayed.

Preload

Preload next image: Enabling this option will cause GQview to read the next logical image from disk when idle, it will also retain the previously viewed image in memory. By reading the nearest images into memory, time to display the next image is reduced.

Note: This option will increase GQview memory requirements, and may cause performance issues with very large images. If the use of GQview results in the system noticeably swapping memory to disk, try disabling this feature.