In need of a side-by-side image viewer that runs through directories
I've taken on the monumental task of scanning my family photo albums in and saving them to a NAS (plus cloud, of course). 1000+ photos in, and I had the great idea of also banging through the images with AI to clean them. Anyone who plays with AI knows it can be a little hit-and-miss. The tool of choice was GFPGAN and in some images it cleaned them lovely, others, not so much.
To help sort this out I'm looking for a side-by-side image viewer, similar to something simple like Gwenview, that allows me to look at the files and simply pick the better image. I'm not sure this software even exists after the exhaustive time I've been looking for it. I'm on Linux, so that may be the hindrance here. Brownie points if I can pick the better image, and it copies the file to a new folder to allow building out a mixed bunch of files from the two source folders.
Absolute worst case, I'm willing to put some money in a pot for someone to develop this very needed tool. Best case, if the software doesn't exist and they build it for timasomo.
Note: Tried XNView but it won't compare across folders.
On Linux, for viewing side-by-side—not the file management—you could try a comic book reader like MComix or a smaller program like ssiv (from a former maintainer of an MComix fork).
You'd have to rename the files to be side-by-side (e.g. Photo01-a.jpg, Photo01-b.jpg, Photo02-a.jpg, Photo02-b.jpg, ...), and then copy them back out manually.
This is a Mac only app (I think) but I have used this for years - Photo Sweeper
I don’t know of anything for Windows though.
Edit: Wow, I completely missed the part about you being on Linux—sorry about that!
Photo Sweeper looks just like what OP is asking for. Too bad there's no Linux version (or Windows over Wine).
oof, i somehow missed the part where they said they’re on linux.
This sounds like a pretty easy use of a shell script. You could just iterate through all the images, open them up in your choice of image viewer, and copy them over after prompting you with the two different ones.
I'd agree, and point to sxiv (apparently unmaintained, so maybe nsxiv instead) as a good rendering option for this kind of project.
I was thinking about this. I'm not bad at Bash so it's a project I might just hit at:
Input being source 1 and source 2 for dirs, match file names in to an array from both folders, iterate through showing img1 left and img2 right and asking which one wins.
Right now I'm using Gwenview and just doing left and right arrow, back and forwards, then hitting delete on the image I don't want. I'm getting bored though so scripting this up is coming :D
You’re looking for a photo library manager. These days they are primarily used by photographers and come with raw development and basic tweaking tools. Adobe Lightroom is probably the most popular of them all but Capture One has also become popular and Darktable is available for free. There are even more options out there too.
A bit of an unconventional suggestion: Make a Windows live CD (e.g. Live10/Live11, Windows To Go, etc.), then install one of the Windows solutions out there.
I've personally used the Visual Similarity Duplicate Finder, which IIUC would take care of the need to write logic to group files by filename pairs, since it can group duplicates for side by side comparison. (I figure this is suitable because I imagine the AI-fixed images would be e.g. >90% similarity, and the fuzzy duplicate finding can handle this.)
If you are comparing arbitrary images, feh or ACDSee might be good fits: https://tildes.net/~comp/19px/app_or_workflow_suggestion_for_viewing_and_selecting_photos_on_pc#comment-abu3
If you are selecting images that are similar, near duplicates, then you could try cbird or czkawka.
I've detailed how I use czkawka to have a side-by-side comparison here (it's a custom python script that uses
mpv):https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/15xoj8w/iso_photo_sorter_and_matcher/jx7gg2c/