Can't start w/ blank screen on Image Viewer

Hardware Librem 5
1

This is about “Image Viewer” (IV)
Now, when I open Image Viewer, I get the last image that was on it from last day I viewed images.

I don’t remember it doing this before. It seem to remember it opened to a blank screen.

QUESTION:
Is there a way to set Image Viewer to start with a blank screen?

TIA
~s

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2

I remember that being a new feature from couple of months ago, so it’s definitely new and was touted as a feature. I’m not sure how to get the old behavior back, though.

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3

From the terminal, can you do

eog --version

and post the output here?

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4

It says:
GNOME Image Viewer 3.38.2

TIA

5

Really. That’s a feature??? I hope there are no more new features.
Pretty annoying. and the layout is Meh. Thanks for the info.

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6

Multiple answers to that.

  1. No, I couldn’t find one.
  2. The behaviour that I observe is that Image Viewer always opens the Pictures folder and always displays the first alphabetical file (of a supported type e.g. .jpg). It does not appear to remember either the image that I last looked at or the directory that contains that image. (This is, in general, a good thing from a privacy point of view.) So the answer is: Keep your Pictures folder free of images. However even that then leads to a rather unpleasant error message

    No images found in "file:///home/purism/Pictures".

So I guess the hack answer would be … create a “blank” image, for your definition of blank, and put it in Pictures and call it !!!blank.png (where you can replace ! in that filename with a space character but the forum software won’t let me do that - but even if you leave the exclamation marks as they are, it will basically work).

The above discussion only applies if Image Viewer is invoked from the home screen. If you use the Files application and then get Files to invoke Image Viewer in order to view a listed file that is of an image type then Image Viewer will just open the file that Files wants it to open. (In other words, this is the difference between eog and eog some-image-file )

Example file follows:
!!!blank
Example file is above this line.

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7

This only started after the last update/upgrade. Yes, it had been a while. But to get back to a privacy window, unupate and unupgrade :rofl:

I just opened Image Viewer. Do you remember my other problem where I could not get any items to show under Categories in PureOS Store? Well, when I open Image Viewer, it reminded me that I took a screen cap of the PureOS Store landing page. Guess what is showing now when ever I direct start Image Viewer from it’s desktop icon. Arrrrggg! It hates me.
I’ll take a screencap of the desktop and save that as filename using your suggestion. Then, when I click Image Viewer on the desktop, I’ll be back here asking why Image Viewer won’t load any more :crazy_face: and non of the icons work any more.

I’ll just make one blank black screen with dark grey fonts saying “This blank page was left here on purpose.” I have seen paper forms that do that.

Thanks Mate,
~s

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8

You can get the previous behavior back with:

ln -s /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.eog.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
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9

Ah, got me again with the librem5 custom version of the .desktop file.

So my previous post is only part of the story.

If this problem were bugging me personally, I would hack eog.sh so that if the directory is empty of suitable images then I would suppress it, at least when the default directory (Pictures) is being applied. I might also be tempted to give the user some hack-configured mechanism to suppress the default being applied even when non-empty.

Anyway, hopefully @Sharon is happy with your suggested command.

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10

I have @dos suggestion saved to my L5 folder - on another device.
It’s why I usually hold off on updates/upgrades until the full beta test has feedback about any issue/s.

Thanks
~s

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