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timg(1) timg(1)

NAME
timg - A terminal image and video viewer

SYNOPSIS
timg [<options>] <image/video> [<image/video>...]

DESCRIPTION
Show images, play animated gifs, scroll static images or play videos in
the terminal. Even show PDFs.

View images without leaving the comfort of your shell. Sometimes this
is the only way if your terminal is connected remotely via ssh.

The command line accepts any number of image/video filenames (or read a
list of filenames from a file) and shows these in sequence one per page
or in a grid in multiple columns, depending on your choice of --grid.
The output is emitted in-line with minimally messing with your termi-
nal, so you can simply go back in history using your terminals' scroll-
bar (Or redirecting the output to a file allows you to later simply cat
that file to your terminal. Even less -R seems to be happy with such
output).

The special filename "-" stands for standard input, so you can read an
image from a pipe. If the input from a pipe is a video, use the -V op-
tion (see below).

Under the hood, timg uses various image libraries to open and decode a
wide range of image formats. It uses threads to open and decode images
in parallel for super-fast viewing experience for many images. To play
videos, it uses libav from files and URLs. With -I or -V you can
choose to use only one of these file decoders ({GraphicsMagick, turbo-
jpeg, qoi} or libav respectively).

OPTIONS
General Options
Most likely commonly needed options first.

-p <[h|q|s|k|i]>, --pixelation=[h|q|s|k|i]
Choice for pixelation of the content.

Available values

half (short `h')
Uses unicode half block characters, this is the lowest
resolution. Color is using a lower or upper half block
and chooses the foreground color and background color to
make up two vertical pixels per character cell. Half
blocks have a pixel aspect ratio of about 1:1 and repre-
sent colors correctly, but they look more `blocky'.

quarter (short `q')
This chooses a Unicdoe character with small sub-blocks
for four pixels per characcter cell. Quarter blocks will
have a pixel aspect ratio of 1:2 (timg will stretch the
picture accordingly, no worries), and can only represent
colors approximately, as the four quadrant sub-pixels can
only be foreground or background color. This increases
the spatial resolution in x-direction at expense of
slight less color accuracy. It makes it look less
`blocky' and usually better.

sixel (short `s')
Sixel output allows a high resolution image output that
dates back to DEC VT200 and VT340 terminals. This image
mode provides full resolution on a 256 color palette that
timg optimizes for each image. You find the sixel proto-
col implemented by xterm (invoke with -ti vt340) and ml-
term or konsole. Recently, more terminal emulators re-
discovered this format and started implementing it. This
does not work in tmux, but there is a tmux fork with
sixel support around.

kitty (short `k')
The Kitty terminal implements an image protocol that al-
lows for full 24Bit RGB/32 Bit RGBA images to be dis-
played. This is implemented in the kitty terminal but
also e.g. konsole. You can even use this in tmux: This
is the only protocol that can work around the reluctance
of tmux to allow graphics protocols. Some creative
workarounds (Unicode placeholders) are used that are only
implemented in kitty version >= 0.28 right now. Also
needs tmux version >= 3.3. You have to explicitly set
the -pk option inside tmux as timg would otherwise just
use block-pixels there.

iterm2 (short `i')
The iterm2 graphics is another image protocol that allows
for full 24 Bit RGB/32 Bit RGBA images. It originated on
the popular macOS OpenSource iTerm2 terminal but is now
also implemented by wezterm and konsole as well as in the
VSCode-terminal (enable in vscode settings at checkbox
`Terminal > Integrated: Enable images').

If no option is given, default is taken from environment vari-
able TIMG_PIXELATION. If that is not set, timg attempts to
auto-detect the available terminal feature. Not all full-reso-
lution compatible terminals can be auto-detected so it will fall
back to quarter in that case. Consider passing the -p option or
set the TIMG_PIXELATION environment variable in that case.

--grid=<cols>[x<rows>]
Arrange images in a grid. If only one parameter is given,
arranges in a square grid (e.g. --grid=3 makes a 3x3 grid). Al-
ternatively, you can choose columns and rows that should fit on
one terminal (e.g. --grid=3x2). This is a very useful option if
you want to browse images (see examples below).

-C, --center
Center image(s) and title(s) horizontally in their alotted
space.

--title[=<format-string>]
Print title above each image. It is possible to customize the
title by giving a format string. In this string, the following
format specifiers are expanded:

• %f = full filename

• %b = basename (filename without path)

• %w = image width

• %h = image height

• %D = internal decoder used (image, video, qoi, sta, openslide,
...)

If no format string is given, this is just the filename (%f) or,
if set, what is provided in the TIMG_DEFAULT_TITLE environment
variable.

-f <filelist-file>
Read a list of image filenames to show from this file. The list
needs to be newline separated, so one filename per line. This
option can be supplied multiple times in which case it appends
to the end of the list of images to show. If there are also
filenames on the command line, they will also be shown after the
images from the file list have been shown.

Absolute filenames in the list are used as-is, relative file-
names are resolved relative to the current directory.

(Note: this behavior changed between v1.5.0 and v1.5.1: previ-
ously, -f was resolving relative to the filelist; this changed
to current directory. Look-up relative to the file list is pro-
vided with with uppercase -F).

-F <filelist-file>
Like -f, but relative filenames are resolved relative to the di-
rectory the file list resides in. This allows you to e.g. have
a file list at the top of a directory hierarchy with relative
filenames but are not required to change into that directory
first for timg to resolve the relative paths.

-b <background-color>
Set the background color for transparent images. Common
HTML/SVG/X11 color strings are supported, such as purple,
#00ff00 or rgb(0, 0, 255).

The special value none switches off blending background color
and relies on the terminal to provide alpha-blending. This
works well with kitty and iterm2 graphics, but might result in
less blended edges for the text-block based pixelations.

Another special value is auto:

• For graphics modes, this behaves like none, sending RGBA im-
ages for alpha-blending directly in the terminal.

• For text-block modes, this attempts to query the terminal for
its background color (Best effort; not all terminals support
that). If detection fails, the fallback is `black'.

Default is auto.

-B <checkerboard-other-color>
Show the background of a transparent image in a checkerboard
pattern with the given color, which alternates with the -b
color. The allows for HTTML/SVG/X11 colors like -b.

The checkerboard pattern has square blocks one character cell
wide and half a cell high (see --pattern-size to change).

A common combination would be to use -bgray -Bdarkgray for back-
grounds known from image editors.

Sometimes setting such background is the only way to see an im-
age, e.g. if you have an image with a transparent background
showing content with the same color as your terminal back-
ground...

--pattern-size=<size-factor>
Scale background checkerboard pattern by this factor.

--auto-crop[=<pre-crop>]
Trim same-color pixels around the border of image before dis-
playing. Use this if there is a boring even-colored space
aorund the image which uses too many of our available few pix-
els.

The optional pre-crop is number of pixels to unconditionally
trim all around the original image, for instance to remove a
thin border. The link in the EXAMPLES section shows an example
how this improves showing an xkcd comic with a border.

--rotate=<exif|off>
If `exif', rotate the image according to the exif data stored in
the image. With `off', no rotation is extracted or applied.

-W, --fit-width
Scale to fit width of the available space. This means that the
height can overflow, e.g. be longer than the terminal, so might
require scrolling to see the full picture. Default behavior is
to fit within the allotted width and height.

-U, --upscale[=i]
Allow Upscaling. If an image is smaller than the terminal size,
scale it up to fit the terminal.

By default, larger images are only scaled down and images
smaller than the available pixels in the terminal are left at
the original size (this helps assess small deliberately pixe-
lated images such as icons in their intended appearance). This
option scales up smaller images to fit available space
(e.g. icons).

The long option allows for an optional parameter --upscale=i
that forces the upscaling to be in integer increments to keep
the `blocky' appearance of an upscaled image without bilinear
scale `fuzzing'.

--clear[=every]
Clear screen before first image. This places the image at the
top of the screen.

There is an optional parameter `every' (--clear=every), which
will clean the screen before every image. This only makes sense
if there is no --grid used and if you allow some time to show
the image of course, so good in combination with -w.

-V Tell timg that this is a video, directly read the content as
video and don't attempt to probe image decoding first.

Usually, timg will first attempt to interpret the data as image,
but if it that fails, will fall-back to try interpret the file
as video. However, if the file is coming from stdin, the first
bytes used to probe for the image have already been consumed so
the fall-back would fail in that case... Arguably, this should
be dealt with automatically but isn't :)

Long story short: if you read a video from a pipe, use -V. See
link in EXAMPLES section for a an example.

-I This is an image, don't attempt to fall back to video decoding.
Somewhat the opposite of -V.

-w<seconds>
Wait time in seconds between images when multiple images are
given on the command line. Fractional values such as -w0.3 are
allowed.

-wr<seconds>
Similar to -w, but wait time between rows. If a --grid is cho-
sen, this will wait at the end of a completed row. If no grid
is chosen, then this is equivalent to -w. Both, -w and -wr can
be provided to show each image individually, but also have a
wait time between rows.

-a Switch off anti-aliasing. The images are scaled down to show on
the minimal amount of pixels, so some smoothing is applied for
best visual effect. This option switches off that smoothing.

-g <width>x<height>
Geometry. Scale output to fit inside given number of character
cells. By default, the size is determined by the available
space in the terminal, so you typically won't have to change
this. The image is scaled to fit inside the available box to
fill the screen; see -W if you want to fill the width.

It is possible to only partially specify the size before or af-
ter the x-separator, like -g<width>x or -gx<height>. The corre-
sponding other value is then derived from the terminal size.

-o <outfile>
Write terminal image to given filename instead of stdout.

-E Don't hide the cursor while showing images.

--compress[=<level>]
For the kitty and iterm2 graphics modes: this chooses the com-
pression for the transmission to the terminal. This uses more
CPU on timg, but is desirable when connected over a slow net-
work. Default compression level is 1 which should be reasonable
default in almost all cases. To disable, set to 0 (zero). Use
--verbose to see the amount of data timg sent to the terminal.

--threads=<n>
Run image decoding in parallel with n threads. By default, up
to 3/4 of the reported CPU-cores are used.

--color8
For half and quarter block pixelation: Use 8 bit color mode for
terminals that don't support 24 bit color (only shows 6x6x6 =
216 distinct colors instead of 256x256x256 = 16777216).

--version
Print version and exit.

--verbose
Print some useful information such as observed terminal cells,
chosen pixelation, or observed frame-rate.

-h Print command line option help and exit.

--help Page through detailed manpage-like help and exit.

--debug-no-frame-delay
Don't delay frames in videos or animations but emit as fast as
possible. This might be useful for developers of terminal emu-
lations to do performance tests or simply if you want to redi-
rect the output to a file and don't want to wait.

For Animations, Scrolling, or Video
Usually, animations are shown in full in an infinite loop. These op-
tions limit infinity.

-t<seconds>
Stop an animation after these number of seconds. Fractional
values are allowed.

--loops=<num>
Number of loops through a fully cycle of an animation or video.
A value of -1 stands for `forever'.

If not set, videos loop once, animated images forever unless
there is more than one file to show. If there are multiple
files on the command line, animated images are only shown once
if --loops is not set to prevent the output get stuck on the
first animation.

--frames=<frame-count>
Only render the first frame-count frames in an animation or
video. If frame-count is set to 1, the output just is the first
frame so behaves like a static image. Typically you'd use it
when you show a bunch of images to quickly browse without wait-
ing for animations to finish.

--frame-offset=<offset>
For animations or videos, start at this frame.

Scrolling
--scroll[=<ms>]
Scroll horizontally with an optional delay between updates (de-
fault: 60ms). In the EXAMPLES section is an example how to use
ImageMagick to create a text that you then can scroll with timg
over the terminal.

--delta-move=<dx>:<dy>
Scroll with delta x and delta y. The default of 1:0 scrolls it
horizontally, but with this option you can scroll vertically or
even diagonally.

RETURN VALUES
Exit code is

0 On reading and displaying all images successfully.

1 If any of the images could not be read or decoded or if there
was no image provided.

2 If an invalid option or parameter was provided.

3 If timg could not determine the size of terminal (not a tty?).
Provide -g option to provide size of the output to be generated.

4 Could not write to output file provided with -o.

5 Could not read file list file provided with -f.

ENVIRONMENT
TIMG_DEFAULT_TITLE
The default format string used for --title. If not given, the
default title format string is "%f".

TIMG_PIXELATION
The default pixelation if not provided by the -p or --pixelation
option (see choice of values there). If neither the environment
variable nor the option is given, timg attempts to auto-detect
the best pixelation for the terminal.

TIMG_USE_UPPER_BLOCK
If this environment variable is set to the value 1, timg will
use the U+2580 - `Upper Half Block' Unicode character.

To display pixels, timg uses a Unicode half block and sets the
foreground color and background color to get two vertical pix-
els. By default, it uses the U+2584 - `Lower Half Block' char-
acter to achieve this goal. This has been chosen as it resulted
in the best image in all tested terminals (konsole, gnome termi-
nal and cool-retro-term). So usually, there is no need to
change that. But if the terminal or font result in a funny out-
put, this might be worth a try. This is an environment variable
because if it turns out to yield a better result on your system,
you can set it once in your profile and forget about it.

TIMG_FONT_WIDTH_CORRECT
A floating point stretch factor in width direction to correct
for fonts that don't produce quite square output.

If you notice that the image displayed is not quite the right
aspect ratio because of the font used, you can modify this fac-
tor to make it look correct. Increasing the visual width by 10%
would be setting it to TIMG_FONT_WIDTH_CORRECT=1.1 for instance.

This is an environment variable, so that you can set it once to
best fit your terminal emulator of choice.

TIMG_ALLOW_FRAME_SKIP
Set this environment variable to 1 if you like to allow timg to
drop frames when play-back is falling behind. This is particu-
larly useful if you are on a very slow remote terminal connec-
tion that can't keep up with playing videos. Or if you have a
very slow CPU.

EXAMPLES
Some example invocations including scrolling text or streaming an on-
line video are put together at <https://timg.sh/#examples>

It might be useful to prepare some environment variables or aliases in
the startup profile of your shell. The timg author typically has these
set:

# The default --title format
export TIMG_DEFAULT_TITLE="%b (%wx%h)"

# image list. An alias to quickly list images; invoke with ils images/*
alias ils='timg --grid=3x1 --upscale=i --center --title --frames=1 -bgray -Bdarkgray'

KNOWN ISSUES
This requires a terminal that can deal with Unicode characters and 24
bit color escape codes. This will be problematic on really old instal-
lations or if you want to display images on some limited text console.

The option -V should not be necessary for streaming video from stdin;
timg should internally buffer bytes it uses for probing.

BUGS
Report bugs at <http://github.com/hzeller/timg/issues>

<https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html>

SEE ALSO
GraphicsMagick, ffmpeg(1), utf-8(7), unicode(7), kitty(1),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

AUTHORS
Henner Zeller.

Dec 2023 timg(1)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=timg&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+14.3.quarterly>

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