With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, using Nautilus “open with…” can fail to open images with an image viewer or editor different from the default.
Using Nautilus, select 2 or more image files of different types (containing both jpg and png files). You will be unable to use “Open With…” from context menu to open your selection in an alternate viewer instead of the default.
In the image, I select gthumb to open a selection of images. It will fail to launch. (In fact, from this dialog, even the default “Image Viewer” fails to launch).
New behavior by design, or a bug?
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is not affected.
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I confirm that I get the same results. It works on 24.04, but fails on 26.04.
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This is a bug, not a design decision.
When you select files with mixed MIME types — say image/jpeg and image/png together, Nautilus tries to find apps that declare support for all of those types simultaneously. When that resolution fails, it just does nothing. No error, no fallback, just silence. That’s why even Image Viewer dies in your screenshot — the launch never actually gets dispatched.
The reason 24.04 doesn’t have this problem is that it ships Nautilus 46.x, which handles the “Open With” dialog differently. The regression is in the 50.x series specifically.
The fix landed in Nautilus 50.2. If you look at the official GNOME 50.2 release changelog, under the nautilus section:
Major Changes in 50.2
* Enhancements:
- Allow opening multiple files with different extensions (pagarao)
That’s exactly this bug. Ubuntu 26.04 however ships nautilus 1:50.1-2ubuntu2 still on 50.0 or 50.1, and the GNOME 50.2 bundle bumped Nautilus straight to 50.2.2, which is what Fedora 44 and Arch now have. Ubuntu doesn’t track upstream GNOME minor releases closely — 24.04 for example still sits on nautilus 46.4, despite upstream being at 46.9, two years later. Same pattern here.
In the meantime the cleanest workaround is just launching from the terminal:
gthumb file1.jpg file2.png file3.webp
The breakage is purely in Nautilus’s dialog logic — the apps themselves handle mixed types just fine. Worth filing a Launchpad bug against the nautilus package and pointing to that changelog entry as upstream confirmation the fix exists and just needs to be packaged.
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@Dennis_N — If you file a bug, please post the link here so that I can upvote it.
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Since a fix is in nautilus 50.2, changing the default for both jpg and png to gthumb is my workaround. Then you have “Open with gThumb” in the context menu. gThumb serves as a viewer and editor.
For anyone wanting to know how to choose the default app, rt-click on an image file, choose “Open with…”, select the viewer you want as default, and then at the bottom of the dialog is a switch to make the chosen app the default for images of that type.
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