Alternative image and photo viewers

gThumb

gThumb [3] may look like yet another image viewer, but behind its unassuming appearance hides a rather capable application that can help you to keep tabs on your images and media files with consummate ease (Figure 7).

Figure 7: gThumb in all its beauty.

The application features several creature comforts that make it easier to view and manage images. The bookmarks functionality, for example, can save time when navigating to often-used folders. To add a bookmark, select the desired folder and choose Bookmarks | Add Bookmark (or use the Ctrl+D keyboard shortcut). This creates a bookmark in the Bookmarks menu.

Filters is another handy feature that can be used to show only images matching specific criteria. Say you want to view only photos tagged with tokyo . Choose View | Filter , select Images from the drop-down list, and press the New button to create a filter. In the Edit Filter dialog, give the filter a name, and specify a rule as shown in Figure 8. Press Save to save the filter and close the Filters window. Enable the filterbar by choosing View | Filterbar , then pick the created filter from the filter list in the filterbar.

Figure 8: Specifying a filter in gThumb.

Although the filtering functionality can be useful for showing a subset of images on-the-fly, the Catalog feature lets you create permanent collections. Catalogs in gThumb act as virtual folders (i.e., photos added to a catalog remain in their original folders). Using this feature, you can keep photos from different folders in one catalog.

For example, if you have photos taken in Berlin in different folders on your hard disk, you can group them all into a Berlin catalog. To do this, right-click on the Catalogs entry in the navigation pane, choose Create Catalog , give the new catalog a name, and press Create .

You have two ways to add photos to the catalog. The easiest one is to simply drag and drop selected photos into the catalog. Alternatively, you can right-click on a photo and select Add to Catalog in the context menu. Instead of creating catalogs and adding photos to them by hand, you can use the Organize feature to do the job for you. This nifty tool can automatically organize photos in the current folder into catalogs based on specific criteria.

To organize, for example, all photos containing the travel tag into a Travel catalog, press the Organize button in the upper-right corner of gThumb's window (Figure 9).

Figure 9: Using the Organize tool.

Select the Tags item from the Group file by drop-down list, enable the Include sub-folders option if you want the tool to process sub-folders, and press Execute . Next, enable the travel tag and press Save . This process automatically creates the Tags | travel catalog with all the matching photos in it.

If you use tags to keep tabs on your photos, you'll appreciate gThumb's tag editing feature. To quickly assign one of the existing tags to a specific photo, right-click on it and choose the desired tag from the Tags menu. Choose the Other item to add new tags and assign them to the photo.

gThumb lets you modify additional metadata, too. To do this, press the Comment button on the main toolbar to open the Metadata dialog.

The application also features a handful of basic editing tools (Figure 10). To access them, double-click on a photo to open it, then press the Edit file button in the top-right corner of the editing interface. Although gThumb won't replace a dedicated image editing application, the available tools can come in handy for quickly tweaking basic settings like brightness, saturation, and contrast as well as adjusting white balance and fixing common problems.

Figure 10: gThumb features basic editing tools.

When it comes to sharing photos, the Share button in the main menu lets you upload photos to several popular photo-sharing services, including Flickr, Picasa Web, and Photobucket. Additionally, you can use the Web Album command to generate static HTML-based photo albums.

gThumb is available in the official Ubuntu repositories, so you can install it via the Software Center or by running the sudo apt-get install gthumb command.

Final Word

Each of the image viewers covered here have their own advantages and drawbacks. PhotoQt is a perfect tool for showcasing photos, and as such, it lacks any features for organizing and editing images. Geeqie can handle RAW files, which makes it a great choice for photographers who shoot in RAW. And, gThumb offers several powerful tools for keeping tabs on a large number of photos.

The good news is that you don't have to choose between these three applications. Install them all on your machine and use each of them for the tasks they handle best.