rayimg

rayimg is a lightweight image viewer designed to run on Raspberry Pis. It has a slideshow mode and displays via the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) on a Raspberry Pi, so X/Wayland are not needed - this makes it nice to run on a lightweight OS! Check out my other project PiSlide OS if interested. It supports many image formats, including more modern ones: JPG, PNG, WEBP, AVIF, JXL, HEIF, HEIC, SVG, BMP, TIFF, and QOI.

It has been built and tested on a Pi 0W, Pi 3, and Pi 4.

Installation

rayimg is not currently available as a binary. It's mostly created to be used in PiSlide OS. I might explore looking into how best to distribute it. You can always build it from source on the Pi of your choosing!

Features

• Modern and common image formats!
• Arrow Key Navigation
• Load images from the commandline: rayimg some-folder/image.jxl
• Load an entire folder of images and navigate with arrow keys: rayimg some-folder
  • or recurse into sub folders rayimg --recursive some-folder
• Sorting files in a folder rayimg --sort random some-folder
• Support for automatically transitioning between images rayimg --duration 3 some-folder
  • with a cool cross-dissolve effect: rayimg --duration 3 --transition-duration 2 some-folder
• Support for displaying filenames or captions on screen rayimg --display filename
  • A captions for example.jpg would be next to it as example.jpg.txt and can be displayed with rayimg --display caption

all flags and their options can be found with rayimg --help.

Loading via ini files

When passing in a single folder, rayimg can load settings via a slide_settings.ini file that lives in that folder: Example slide_settings.ini:

# duration to show each slide in seconds
Duration = 7

# how long the crossfade should happen
# can set to 0 to disable fade
TransitionDuration = 3

# set to true (without quotes) if there are sub-folders in this directory that have images to display
Recursive = false

# can be "none", "filename", or "caption" to display various text over the images
# a "caption" is simply the exact filename (including extension) with .txt on the end
# ex: The caption for bird.jpg would be in bird.jpg.txt
Display = "none"

# can be "filename", "natural", or "random"
# "natural" sorts mostly alphabetically, but tries to handle numbers correctly.
# Ex "filename": f-1.jpg, f-10.jpg, f-2.jpg
# Ex "natural": f-1.jpg, f-2.jpg, f-10.jpg
Sort = "natural"

How it works

rayimg uses raylib for rendering images on-screen, and support for some image formats. The more modern formats are supported via libvips.

Building on a Pi

rayimg is written in golang, as as such needs a modern Go install (unfortunately, you can't just apt get it, the version in the apt repositories are usually out of date).

You also need the following pacakages to build against raylib and libvips:

sudo apt-get install libdrm-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev libgbm-dev libvips-dev

From there, on a Raspberry Pi you can cd to the cloned repository and just go build -tags drm github.com/JarvyJ/rayimg/cmd/rayimg and a rayimg binary will be created.

Building on other platforms

rayimg needs the following to build:

• golang: Go is supported on various platforms and installation instructions can be found on their site.
• raylib: raylib is also supported by multiple platforms
• libvips: libvips website includes how to find in on various platforms

From there, it can be built with go:

go build github.com/JarvyJ/rayimg/cmd/rayimg

I've done all of my testing on Linux and Raspberry Pis, so I can't quite speak to building it on other platforms.

Why vendor?

Since this project is pulled into a buildroot build and some of the vendor files include .c files, we need to include all of them since they don't get pulled in correctly with go mod vendor. I'm currently using vend for this. If there's a better way, please feel free to open an issue!