Today’s article is going to do exactly what it says in the headline, it’s going to show you how to install XnView MP on Ubuntu. It won’t be a very long article, perhaps a bit longer than some, nor will it be all that difficult. XnView is a great photo viewing and manipulation application that I invite you to try out. I’ll be counting this as a review. That defines it best.
First, let me be clear… XnView is a closed-source application. It is proprietary and you never own the software. That doesn’t make it bad, it’s great software, it just means that some people may choose to ignore this article in favor of truly open software. That’s okay, they have that choice. Yay! Freedom!
So, what is XnView? It’s an image viewing/manipulation tool. It even allows you to do some batch processing on images, while offering some great ways to visualize your image collections. I was a fan back when I used Windows. When they started releasing versions for Linux I was pretty stoked.
In fact, it used to be XnView and now it’s XnView MP with the ‘MP’ standing for ‘multi-platform’. And, well, that’s true. It is mult-platform. And, well, that’s a great thing. I love this program!
I have previously mentioned XnView MP in these articles:
Let’s Reduce The Size Of .png Files
How To: Sanitize Exif Data From Your Digital Images For Privacy Sake
And, while this article is aimed at Ubuntu, it will work for other distros with just a few changes. Feel free to check XnView.com to see if they have a download for you.
See, the greatest thing about XnView MP is exactly how many image files types it can deal with. It works for *all of them*. You’ll have to work REALLY hard to find an image format that doesn’t work properly in XnView.
Lemme find you a link…
Here, XnView handles more than 500 image formats. I wasn’t kidding. You’ll work REALLY hard to find an image format that’s unsupported by XnView MP!
Not only that, you can convert between image formats. You can not only do so, you can batch process them. If you visit the link, everything with the ‘write’ box checked can be converted to. It’s an easy to operate application, as well.
You can also do things like watermark an image – and, again, do so by batch processing your image collection. There are other tools from the same company, including XnConvert which is a more specialized tool. Examine those in your free time, if you’d like.
Anyhow, XnView MP has the usual tools. You can resize and crop. You can edit red eye out of the image. You can adjust contrast and light. Then, there are a variety of effects and filters you can apply.
Finally, or not, you can view your photo collection in a variety of ways. You have everything from filmstrip view to slideshow options. There’s a bunch of different choices and things like EXIF data are supported. You really can’t go wrong with XnView MP.
This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.
Once you’re there, let’s change to the Downloads directory:
cd Downloads
Next, you’re gonna download XnView MP:
wget https://download.xnview.com/XnView MP-linux-x64.deb
Finally, you’ll want to install XnView MP:
sudo apt install ./XnView MP-linux-x64.deb
Now, XnView MP updates frequently, so you’ll want to remember this page and these steps. When XnView MP updates, simply run the above commands all over again and you can update XnView MP on Ubuntu. It’s amazing what you can do in the terminal. You can do all the things in the terminal!
By pure happenstance, I happened to check this on a Linux Mint box. It’s an older version of XnView, but you can actually find a version of XnView in the default repositories. It probably(?) won’t update with nearly the same frequency as your manual updates, but Mint users can install XnView with:
sudo apt install xnview
Follow the prompts and you can install what I suppose would be a supported version of XnView. I can’t think of any good reason to use an older version, but I wanted to mention that the option is there. Then again, it might just be the same and update with the same frequency. I confess that I’ve never tried it.
Notably, there’s no such option on Lubuntu (Ubuntu) 22.04. So, I guess it’s a Mint thing. Even with Mint, I’d expect that you’ll be just fine by installing XnView MP with the method above. The above method will, of course, work on any system that’s using a package manager that works with .deb files. Easy peasy…
And there you have it. You have a new article! This time around, you’ll have learned how to install XnView MP on Ubuntu. It’s not terribly difficult and it’s a great application.
Sure, it’s proprietary – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. If you’re philosophically opposed to closed source software, this article isn’t really meant for you. Again, this is really more of a review – a way to make more Linux users aware that XnView exists and is available for Linux.
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It looks like the first version of XnView MP, that is the version that supported Linux, was in 2010. That sounds about right. Though, for all I know, they supported it earlier and I just didn't notice. Ah well...
https://download.xnview.com/old_versions/