Ubuntu – Low quality image rendering in gthumb/eog

Unfortunately, it seems difficult to configure most image viewing software like gthumb, shotwell, or eog to do this. There doesn't seem to be any hidden options available in dconf-editor or gsettings after investigation.

There are two possibilities, however:

1. The first is Pinta, which is available in the repositories and supports scrolling a zoomed image well. It supports using the mouse scroll wheel to scroll vertically, and you can also click to scroll horizontally.

   

2. The second is to use firefox in conjunction with the image zoom 0.4.6 addon, and then you can zoom into the picture and indeed scroll it. Firefox supports most image formats, and you can just right click and open an image in Firefox or open it like this:

   firefox /home/mike/Pictures/IMG_1207.JPG

   which will then be displayed in the browser at the local address of

   file:///home/mike/Pictures/IMG_1207.JPG

   Firefox can be used like a file manager for local or network files and most images formats like jpg, tif, gif, png can be opened.

   As you can see in the screenshot below, there are settings for the scroll zoom when you go to firefox > addons > image zoom > preferences. Scrolling using both the middle mouse wheel or the two fingers mode on the touchpad works as well.

   As noted in the description for the addon, you can use it to:

   easily zoom in, zoom out, fit image to screen or set custom zoom on individual images...All this can be done by using the context menu or a combination of mouse buttons and scroll wheel.

   Just open the image in firefox, zoom it up and then you are able to scroll it; it is about the best way of achieving what you want at the minute and I use it regularly.

   

I don’t have enough information to know for sure but I think that your problem is in the color profile of the image itself. If that’s the case then I’m fairly sure that I have a solution.
If you have a recent distribution of Ubuntu, then you have ImageMagick. You can check for it by typing just the word “convert” into your terminal. If you get several screens of usage information then you have it. If not, you may want to look for it on the Software Center. Assuming that you have ImageMagick, open your terminal, navigate to the directory where you image file is and type:

Convert “filename” –colorspace RGB  “newfilename”

Where “filename” is the name of your image and “newfilename” is what you want to call the modified version. Now try opening “newfilename” in eog and let us know what happens.