Eckhard M. Jäger

Photoshop PSD support for Gnome

Wednesday, December 17, 2008 7:07:22 PM

PSD, Photoshop, thumbnail, imageing, gnu image manipulation programm, preview, GIMP, nautilus, gnome, xcf, image editor

Today i get a real amazing message from Jan Dudek. He started developing a PixBuf load for Photoshop PSD files for the Gnome Linux Desktop. That means PSD support for any Gnome application like the image viewer EOG, the document viewer Evince and in combination a thumbnailer for *.psd or *.pdd files for Nautilus too.

Jan wrote "I'm not a designer, but in my work I often have to use PSD files and, as you have written on your blog some time ago, viewing them under Linux is a bit troublesome. So I decided to try to write GdkPixbuf loader that would let applications like gThumb or Eye of Gnome open PSDs. After some time it seems to be working, but it's still far from complete. Anyway, the loader handles RGB images with 8bit color depth - I assume these are most common (at least most PSDs on my hard disk are such ones). It is possible to add support for CMYK, Grayscale and others."
Hey Jan you are my personal hero at all and i will support your development by a donation that i promised once. You can grab a Deb package that works with Ubuntu Hardy and Ibex at the Google Code page.

How to create a PSD thumbnailer for Nautilus
* open a terminal
* Setup a thumbnailer based on Evince

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/image@x-psd/command -t string "evince-thumbnailer -s %s %u %o"

* Enable the thumbnailer

 gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/image@x-psd/enable -t boolean "True"

Enjoy

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Comments

Anonymous # Wednesday, December 17, 2008 8:40:23 PM

Steven Garrity writes: Awesome. I hope this ends up shipping with Gnome by default. I couldn't get it working on Fedora 10, but that probably has more to do with my own incompetence.

Jan Dudekjandudek # Wednesday, December 17, 2008 9:27:16 PM

Steven - I'm sorry, I don't use Fedora and never tried to create RPM, maybe I will take a look if I find some time. At the moment probably the only way to install it on Fedora is manual compilation.

Yeah, I agree it would be great if Gnome/GTK developers included the loader in GTK.

Anonymous # Wednesday, December 17, 2008 11:19:34 PM

Anonymous writes: Stiven you can try alien to convert deb packages to rpg

Anonymous # Wednesday, December 17, 2008 11:21:32 PM

Anonymous writes: Stiven you can try alien to convert deb packages to rpm PS: sorry for mistake

PhillipWutske # Thursday, December 18, 2008 11:00:50 AM

That's nice, didn't realise it didn't exist

.

Going to try installing it on openSuse 11.0 after lunch

PhillipWutske # Thursday, December 18, 2008 3:34:46 PM

Installed and working

Anonymous # Monday, January 5, 2009 5:21:44 AM

ajamison writes: I noticed it seems that psds loaded using this have locked layers. Text is not able to be edited but can be deleted not sure if this is just me or what

Eckhard M. Jägerarea42 # Wednesday, January 14, 2009 4:51:57 PM

@ajamison
In which software you use it to load PSD files?

Anonymous # Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:22:39 AM

Anonymous writes: Noticed that as well, I can delete text but not edit it. (gimp 2.4 on Fedora 8).

Eckhard M. Jägerarea42 # Wednesday, January 21, 2009 2:43:36 PM

This PSD loader isn't the same used by Gimp. Gimp has its own loader - and yes it didn't support text layers.

Anonymous # Tuesday, January 27, 2009 3:23:37 PM

Jonathan writes: Thanks for this info... and in fact for your whole blog. Really nice, helpful, and much appreciated by me. I am making the switch from 20 years in the world of Windows to that of Linux. I've been using Linux for some years now, but never "switched" completely over to it, as I had too many applications I wanted to run on XP. One of the big things keeping me on Windows (and still having me dual booting and using XP on Vbox at this stage) is my love of Adobe Indesign CS3/4. Nearly all other apps I considered essential I have managed to change to linux apps,,, and your blog has helped me with a few finishing touches such as Inkscape to replace Illustrator. Once I find something that matches up to InDesign I suspect I'll be free of running Windows. I have a few apps using Wine, and I can live with that. Again... thanks for sharing your design adventures in Linux Land. Jonathan

Anonymous # Tuesday, May 26, 2009 3:01:15 PM

C4Ptain writes: This must be implemented as default for Gnome! It's very useful.

Anonymous # Wednesday, September 2, 2009 2:22:07 PM

jorjoso writes: thanks :D

Anonymous # Friday, May 27, 2011 8:18:25 AM

Anonymous writes: YEY...thank u for this

Eckhard M. Jägerarea42 # Friday, May 27, 2011 12:33:06 PM

Try to install Gloobus too!

Anonymous # Monday, August 15, 2011 4:33:14 AM

Anonymous writes: Late to the party, but does this work with Ubuntu 11.04? I can't seem to get any results.

Eckhard M. Jägerarea42 # Monday, August 15, 2011 6:27:09 AM

Try to install Gloobus and take a look here:
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/thumbnailer-gnome-nautilus-desktop

Anonymous # Monday, August 29, 2011 3:14:21 PM

Alan writes: I have installed Gloobus (Thanks for the heads up) but it only seems to read 8-bit files. 16-bit (or deeper I would assume) do not show up. Any suggestions?

Eckhard M. Jägerarea42 # Tuesday, August 30, 2011 10:26:02 AM

Nope, try to contact/ support the Gloobus people.