KDE developer Nate Graham has proposed Photos, formerly known as Koko, as a potential future replacement for Gwenview, KDE’s long-standing image viewer. For reference, Gwenview has been KDE’s main image viewer for over 25 years and is still a strong, feature-rich app.
But Graham says its underlying design now limits improvements in areas like handling large image libraries, using GPU acceleration, supporting mobile devices, and moving to a more flexible QtQuick interface. Fixing these would require major rewrites.
He also notes that fewer people have been contributing to Gwenview lately, which suggests developers are less interested in making big changes to its current design.
That’s where Photos comes in. The app started as Koko, mainly an image gallery for Plasma Mobile, with development beginning around 2017. KDE calls it an image gallery, with its first official release in 2021.
In the past year, Techpaladin Software, where Graham is CEO, has supported work to make Photos a top desktop app and to add features so it matches Gwenview.
On top of that, Photos is reported to perform much better than Gwenview, especially with large image collections and HiDPI screens. Its UI works on both desktop and mobile, and it can shrink to fit very small windows.
The app also uses Spectacle’s annotation system and lets you mark images as favorites. It includes timeline, location, and all-images views.
However, KDE has not officially retired Gwenview or said that Photos will be the new default image viewer. For now, it’s just a proposal, and users and distributions are invited to try Photos and share their feedback.
For additional details, see Graham’s post.
Image credits: Nate Graham
