Enabling HEIC/HEIF and AVIF image support in Devuan

greenjeans · 2025-03-12 17:13:14

The HEIF/HEIC image format and the AVIF format have basic support in Devuan
in the form of libheif which is onboard in all versions. But to enable full support it
takes a little more than that, here's how to enable viewing and thumbnailing:

Install two packages, heif-gdk-pixbuf and heif-thumbnailer, for Mate
that's all you need to do and thumbnails will work in Caja and you can view them with
the Eye-of-Mate image viewer or Gpicview which is what I use. The Mate right-click image
re-sizer works for quick re-sizing.

If you need to convert the image to a .jpg or .png, you can open the image in GIMP and
export, or in terminal you can use Imagemagick to do so:
convert random.heic random.jpg

This also works in PcmanFM for the most part, but PcmanFM has a bug related to
thumbnailing and caching of thumbnailed images of any type in the gtk2 version in the repo,
quick testing of the gtk3 version in testing (excalibur) has the same bug, I reported
it a couple days ago.

Have not tested with other DE's/file-managers.

forte · 2025-03-12 17:24:38

I can confirm that this works in XFCE with Thunar. To enable support for WebP I have found that installing webp-pixbuf-loader works to visualize images, although not thumbnails.

greenjeans · 2025-03-12 17:43:57

To enable support for WebP I have found that installing webp-pixbuf-loader works to visualize images, although not thumbnails.

Hmm, i'm getting proper viewing and thumbnailing of webp images in Mate/Caja and OB/PcmanFM here, but it's been a while since I added that support so I can't remember if the webp-pixbuf-loader was all I had to add.

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#1 2025-03-12 17:13:14

Enabling HEIC/HEIF and AVIF image support in Devuan

#2 2025-03-12 17:24:38

Re: Enabling HEIC/HEIF and AVIF image support in Devuan

#3 2025-03-12 17:43:57

Re: Enabling HEIC/HEIF and AVIF image support in Devuan

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