Linux photo viewers and browsers
Introduction
I should let you know up front what I do and don't want
from an image viewer.
- I want to be able to efficiently look through a directory full
of hundreds of image.
- I do not want an image editor.
- I never want it to modify an image.
- I do not want any help organizing my images.
- I do not want any attempts to render raw files.
- I do not want a photo import tool.
Adobe Bridge
OK, I'll admit it. I run windows for the single sole purpose of
running photoshop. As a serious photographer, I decided that the
expense of a second computer and photoshop itself was money well
spent. Photoshop might be the most impressive piece of application
software I have ever used, bar none. Adobe bridge is the standard
that all of the image viewer software packages should strive to
emulate.
gthumb
The viewer I have the most experience with is gthumb.
It does most of what I want quite well.
It's biggest liability is that new releases can be quite flakey.
Many times an official release is buggy and frustrating and I find
myself longing for the version I ran just a month ago.
At one time I got so frustrated that I decided to get my hands on
the source code and see if I could do something about the mess:
Back in 2010 there were a bunch of issues with the "clutter" library
and instability (segfaulting and core dumps) that were alegedly
related to 3D effects. Apparently someone had ideas about doing
"cool things" in slide show mode. All well and good, but unstable
code like this should be thoroughly testing in a development branch,
and besides that, who needs this nonsense.
f-spot
This is often recommended, but from what I have read, it is eager to
import your images and put them into its organizational scheme.
Not what I want.
shotwell
See: A quick grumpy review of
shotwell.
Like f-spot, shotwell seems to want to import your images and organize
them for you.
darktable
See Darktable.org
It looks good, but what scares me is that it says it wants to
"manage my digital negatives in a database". No, No!!
geeqie
I tried this when gthumb was having one of its fits, and thought
it was pretty nice.
ristretto
Also nice, clean, and simple. And it works!
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org