Geeqie, open the file I said

bgstack15 — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:54:00 GMT

While Geeqie is not better than Irfanview, it is native and I've been trying to live with FLOSS. Somehow during the past few years Geeqie has gotten slightly broken and does not always open the exact file I opened from a file manager. So I dug deep enough to fix my problem.

Apparently there is a parameter to open the specific file.

--file=<FILE>|<URL>
    open FILE or URL bring Geeqie window to the top

And of course /usr/share/applications/org.geeqie.Geeqie.desktop (because geeqie.desktop wasn't good enough) does not include that in the Exec line.

Exec=geeqie %F

The spec is a list of files. So perhaps I should have updated the desktop file to call my script, but all I did was write a new script for xfe to associate with the image filetypes.

	`#!/bin/sh`
	`# File: ~/bin/geeqie1`
	`# Startdate: 2026-01-23-6 10:17`
	`# Purpose: fix geeqie so that it points directly to the file it was requested to open with`
	`# Reference:`
	`# man geeqie`
	`for i in "${@}" ;`
	`do`
	`opts="${opts} --file=\"${i}\""`
	`done`
	`eval geeqie "${opts}"`

And then I told xfe to open .jpg, .png, and so on with ~/bin/geeqie1.

Geeqie: add atril as action

bgstack15 — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 12:57:55 GMT

The story

I have tried using geeqie as an alternative to Irfanview. It doesn't do everything Irfanview does, but I can at least use mostly native software most of the time.

So, I recently learned that geeqie does have the ability to navigate through paged documents (read: pdf files). But there's no default hotkeys (at least in Devuan GNU+Linux) for these functions, so the user must click through the menu. Instead of hijacking page up/down from their default values (next/previous file, which are also mapped to up/down arrow keys), I decided to make life difficult for myself.

I had seen the menu entries for plugins. And I noticed that my own custom package of Irfanview which follows the XDG standard for desktop menu entries is properly listed. So I read up on how to add an action, so I can open a file in atril, which is a fork of evince back when it was good (read: from the MATE team).

The solution involves placing file /usr/share/geeqie/applications/atril.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=Atril Document Viewer
GenericName=Document Viewer
Comment=View multi-page documents
Exec=atril %U
Type=Application
Icon=atril
Categories=Graphics;Viewer;X-Geeqie;
Keywords=MATE;document;viewer;pdf;dvi;ps;xps;tiff;pixbuf;djvu;comics;
MimeType=application/pdf;application/x-bzpdf;application/x-gzpdf;application/x-xzpdf;application/postscript;application/x-bzpostscript;application/x-gzpostscript;image/x-eps;image/x-bzeps;image/x-gzeps;application/x-dvi;application/x-bzdvi;application/x-gzdvi;image/vnd.djvu;image/vnd.djvu+multipage;image/tiff;application/x-cbr;application/x-cbz;application/x-cb7;application/x-cbt;application/vnd.comicbook+zip;application/vnd-comicbook.rar;image/*;application/oxps;application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument;application/epub+zip;

Which I derived by removing the localization (sorry, i18n users) entries from the real .desktop file with a grep statement and also adding the important keywords Graphics, Viewer, and X-Geeqie for good measure.

I think it should have interpreted entries in ~/.local/share/geeqie/applications but I didn't test that.

I'll think I'll add this file to my deployment scripts.

Knowledge Base (Posts about geeqie)

Geeqie, open the file I said

Geeqie: add atril as action

The story