Simple image editor for Linux (for thumbnails)

Operating Systems & Open Source Open Source & Web-Based
1

I’m looking for a fairly simple image editor capable of producing halfway decent thumbnails for videos. I just want to be able to start with a background or screenshot, add a few smaller images and logos, reposition or resize them with a mouse, add some text and then save/export the thing.

What I want to try to avoid is learning about layers, alpha channels, transparency, etc. and just be able to create some thumbnails quickly and easily. If that’s not possible, I can try to learn about the details of photo editing, but it’s not really something I want to study.

Any suggestions?

2

I usually here people suggest Gimp for stuff like that. Can’t remember using it much myself.

3

While I’m sure GIMP could do this, it is very (overly?) complex piece of software with a steep learning curve. I just want to do something fairly simple, which really shouldn’'t require using or learning such a complicated tool.

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4

Yeah Gimp is too complex for me. I use Pinta, it’s like Windows Paint for Linux. It does crash sometimes though.

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5

If you are into command line, you could use ffmpeg which is a powerfull tool for processing video. You could create a single thumbnail like this:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "thumbnail,scale=150:-1" -frames:v 1 thumb.png

This will extract a representative thumbnail from “video.mp4” and resize it to 150 wide with maintained aspect ratio for height before storing it to “thumb.png”.

Benefits of this approach is that it can be automated and create thumbs for a lot of videos with a single command.

EDIT: Oh, and if you would want to create a mosaic of representative frames tiled into a single image, this would do:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "select=gt(scene\,0.4),scale=150:-1,tile=5x5" -frames:v 1 mosaic.png

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6

I second Pinta - https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta

It’s a GTK clone of Paint dot NET, which is one of my favorite windows programs.

7

I did try Pinta, but it crashed within 3 minutes of starting it up…

8

Ooof! I haven’t had that experience, though I sporadically use it…

Maybe try something from the Arch Wiki List → List of applications - ArchWiki