Open several pictures and display them in a tiled fashion

Question

I am looking for a program that:

• can open at once up to 4 (more is better) images into one screen, e.g. in a tiled fashion. All opened image must be entirely visible.

E.g. (with 4 images):

If possible:

• free
• works with Linux or Windows 7 SP1 x64 Ultimate.
• has an option to reload or even better auto-refresh the image is modified (actually pretty important, but I'll already be glad to be able to open and view 4 images at once).

I am aware of those image viewers for Windows that auto-refreshes the image when it is modified but as far as I know none of them can open 4 images and display them nicely so that I can see everything.

Answer 1

Emacs

While not a dedicated image viewer, Emacs is a highly extensible text editor. You can split it into several windows, horizontally or vertically using the shortcuts C-x 2, and C-x 3.

It is cross platform, so it runs on both Windows and Linux. But it only natively support images on Linux. For the Windows installation, you'll need additional GnuWin32 packages to be able to view images. See this question for reference. Making images entirely visible can be done using the image+ package (available on MELPA, with the shortcut C-c M-m (refer to this answer).

• Emacs is free
• It works on both Windows and Linux
• It can open multiple files in different buffers as tiled windows
• You can reload individual buffers using the command M-x revert-buffer, or you could activate auto-revert-mode using (global-auto-revert-mode 1)to update the images automatically when changes are detected

You can also find excellent community support on Emacs.SE