#1 2025-05-12 21:34:38

greenjeans

Member

Registered: 2025-01-18

Posts: 229

Website

Enabling support for thumbnailing and viewing of JXL images

I have not tested this in BL yet, possibly y'all already have it, but if not, it might be of
interest going forward.

Enabling .jxl support (bookworm)

Debian already supports Jpeg-XL (.jxl) image files in the form of libjxl 0.7.0
which is brought in with gimp, but this is not enough to enable thumbnailing of
.jxl files or viewing with your pic-viewer, what's needed is updated packages to
version 0.11.1 currently for bookworm.

This adds thumbnailing and viewing support when I tested at least in
Mate/Caja/EOM-pic-viewer and Openbox/PcmanFM/Gpicview.

-Seems to be very quick and working well.-

Caveat: The current Imagemagick 6 doesn't have support for the format, it is added in the next version in trixie,
but unfortunately the right-click re-size and rotate functions in Caja and the ones I use in Openbox won't work
on this format until then. Perhaps it will get back-ported at some point. But this at least gives you
thumbnails and viewing ability without having to open gimp every time.

In general you should be wary about any software outside a stable repo, and
of guys who recommend using stuff from them in forum posts. You have been warned. lol.

This is all experimental stuff, the format itself is still new. This will not give
browsers the ability to view online .jxl images, only the google/mozilla overlords
can do that. Personally I believe in giving folks functionality whenever possible.

Latest packages:
https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/releases?page=1

Archive package I chose:
jxl-debs-amd64-debian-bookworm-v0.11.1.tar.gz

Extract archive, and install just these three:

libjxl_0.11.1_amd64.deb
libjxl-gdk-pixbuf_0.11.1_amd64.deb
libjxl-gimp-plugin_0.11.1_amd64.deb

greenjeans

Member

Registered: 2025-01-18

Posts: 229

Website

Re: Enabling support for thumbnailing and viewing of JXL images

Just a quickie update, been over a week now and everything working great. Both in Mate and Openbox the system seems to struggle a tiny bit when setting a .jxl as wallpaper, but it will do it. I have a working prototype for a right-click image-resizer using gimp as the backend, buggy and slow as can be at the moment, even worse than .xcf, imagemagick works so much better and faster for things like that.

Read that Fedora is now using .jxl's for it's default wallpaper, and Mint just added support for the format in their latest versions. So it seems support is growing for the format. I have not tested it's compression abilities whatsoever, so have no opinion on that as yet. It may be good or bad, but it does seem like even though we didn't need yet another image format to add to the crowd, this one is here to stay.