Gwenview keeps crashing in my Plasma 5 setup. What are the popular reliable alternatives, ie on Plasma5?

That's not directly an answer to your question, but I do not see Gwenview crashing here in Plasma 5.

depends on what you do with Gwenview and whether a requirement was that it be a KDE or QT app

ShowFoto is pretty cool/powerful alternative

why/when does it crash?

if you open it in Konsole do you get any messages when it crashes

I arrived here searching for an alternative to Gwenview too. I have come across at least two issues recently.

1. View a png (I tested three). Hold Ctrl and scroll up to zoom in. It zooms in fine for the first level, then crashes for the second level. My terminal emulator just says `KCrash: Application 'gwenview' crashing...`
2. Open one particular jpg I have (I can upload it somewhere). It displays an error: `Loading 'foo.jpg' failed. Loading meta information failed.` The terminal says `Not a JPEG file: starts with 0x47 0x49` and `libjpeg fatal error`. However, Okular opens the file perfectly.

I'll check out showfoto, but there are some other options here.

sparhawk wrote:I arrived here searching for an alternative to Gwenview too. I have come across at least two issues recently.

1. View a png (I tested three). Hold Ctrl and scroll up to zoom in. It zooms in fine for the first level, then crashes for the second level. My terminal emulator just says `KCrash: Application 'gwenview' crashing...`
2. Open one particular jpg I have (I can upload it somewhere). It displays an error: `Loading 'foo.jpg' failed. Loading meta information failed.` The terminal says `Not a JPEG file: starts with 0x47 0x49` and `libjpeg fatal error`. However, Okular opens the file perfectly.

I'll check out showfoto, but there are some other options here.

1) doesn't for me
2) you should upload it

you should post bugs on bugs.kde.org

Since I started using KDE/Plasma three years ago, I've religiously filed bugs. So far, I've filed 13 bugs. 11 of them are "unconfirmed" and have had no credible response from a developer. One of them had a good discussion going, then was filed "wishlist" (i.e. probably not going to happen). The final one had a patch written by a third party that fixed the issue. We petitioned the devs to respond to the patch and our comments, but they never replied. I almost always get excellent help in these forums, but I feel like I am wasting my limited time filing bugs, copying debugging information, testing permutations, and isolating minimal configs where it occurs.

However, since I very much appreciate these forums, especially your help and others, google01103, here is the jpeg that fails to open.

1) ShowFoto will not open it
2) Properties dialog show contents as a gif and type as a jpg
3) Gimp opens it
4) Kim converts it fine
5) renaming it to either .png or .gif Gwenview opens it fine

my guess is the lib/code that Gwenview and ShowFoto calls when it tries to open this it gets confused because of #2. Seems it determines its not a valid jpg (see error in your post) and thus refuses to continue processing it

Thanks for that; good to know. However, I'm since been trialling a few other programs from the list. Most of them work quite well. Nomacs is pretty nifty: quick and stable but powerful. feh also looks pretty nice, although perhaps a bit too complicated for day-to-day use.