Kindle Touch images support

[Vroo]

It seems that since 5.1 firmware (?) KT has a simple picture viewer.

Images have to be put inside "/images" folder (not "pictures" as on K3/K4), preferably in subfolders or zip files.

Then, the new item "Images" appears on the last page of the filelist (along with "Dictionaries" and "Periodicals Back Issues".



Unfortunately, picture viewer is very limited, there's no way to rotate or zoom in. You can only go through all the images in the folder.

[geekmaster]

The picture viewer works in all firmware versions for all eink kindle. There are different ways to use it for different versions though. And you can view "collections" of images stored in zip files too. Even comic books can be viewed by renaming the file extension from cbz to zip. This was documented in the Dev Corner forum.

[NiLuJe]

@geekmaster: Nearly all FW versions, it was missing from 5.0.x, AFAIR .

(And one of the key differences between FW, older (2/3/4) FW looked inside the pictures/ folder, not images/ like the Touch [I remembered! ]. There's a vague possibility that some versions even handled pictures in documents, but I'm a but hazy on that...).

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@geekmaster: Nearly all FW versions, it was missing from 5.0.x, AFAIR .

(And one of the key differences between FW, older (2/3/4) FW looked inside the pictures/ folder, not images/ like the Touch [I remembered! ]. There's a vague possibility that some versions even handled pictures in documents, but I'm a but hazy on that...).

I am pretty sure that it works on 5.0.x too, as mentioned in my "comic book reader on all kindles" thread (which is now missing a lot of its original content).

I am generally pretty consistent about testing my code and researching my claims thoroughly, but I would have to flash old firmware to reaffirm my claim. It is possible that I had already updated to 5.1.x though when I published that, but I thought it worked on 5.0.x...

[NiLuJe]

@geekmaster: I vaguely remember it being not there, or at the very least not 'plugged in', but, like I said 'AFAIR', and I never actually had a 5.0.x on hand, so .

[tomsem]

When Kindle Touch adds KF8 fixed layout support, there will be another option that works with all post-KK Kindles. It is now supported by Kindle Keyboard and K4 (and of course Fire and some of the apps), and ironically while KT was the first eInk Kindle to get KF8 support, it is now the only one that doesn't support fixed layout (properly).

For fixed-layout (on my updated KK), the entire screen is available (up to 800x600) and you can zoom/pan full-page or panel views (which you cannot do on Kindle Fire, unless that's changed with the new devices). I can envision tools (calibre or some such) that can take a series of image files, and generate pages with thumbnails of those images that can be navigated as Panel Views, or else by detecting 'panels' in the image files and building the HTML that defines them for KF8 fixed layout format.

I wish Amazon would enable bookmarks and annotations for fixed-layout, and change the default Zoom of Panel views to 'Actual Size' rather than 'Fit-to-screen' (or at least saving a change to the Zoom default with the book so it persists across reading sessions), to avoid scaling artifacts, and they need to provide for accessible text (e.g. for TTS), but otherwise I think it is superior to what one could achieve with PDF image files, mobi, or the built in image viewer.

Yes, I'm pretty sure the KT image viewer was there prior to 5.1 update.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@geekmaster: I vaguely remember it being not there, or at the very least not 'plugged in', but, like I said 'AFAIR', and I never actually had a 5.0.x on hand, so .

Viewing images was certainly not an obvious or advertised feature of the K5. Now I am tempted to flash 5.0.0 and test it again just to be certain one way or another (perhaps some day RSN).