iv is a utility for viewing images in the terminal using iTerm2's image display capability. It's useful for dealing with images on a remote server, for example with large image processing tasks.

When displaying single images, iv will resize them to speed up transfer over an SSH connection:

When displaying multiple images, iv will produce a "contact sheet" of images with filenames. These images are decoded and resized in parallel:

iv can be installed using pip:

$ pip3 install iv

If iv can't find any suitable TrueType fonts on your system it'll use an ugly default bitmap font. To get some nicer fonts on Linux, install the Open Sans or msttcorefonts collections (fonts-open-sans or ttf-mscorefonts-installer packages on Debian-like distributions).

Usage: iv [OPTIONS] FILENAME...

  Display images within an iTerm2 terminal.

  iv will resize images to reduce the time taken to display them over SSH
  connections, and it will combine multiple images into a single image, with
  filenames.

  Usage:

    iv ./file.jpg # Display a single file, resizing as appropriate.
    iv *.jpg      # Display a number of files combined into a single image, with filenames.

  The IV_SIZE environment variable can be used to set the output image size
  instead of the -s/--size option.

Options:
  --version           Show the version and exit.
  -s, --size INTEGER  Maximum output image width in pixels.
  --help              Show this message and exit.

iTerm2 may refuse to display extremely large images, and replace them with a retro "broken image" icon. You can always right-click and "Open image" to view the image with an external viewer. iv will ask for confirmation if the image it's about to display is taller than 500 console lines.