gThumb

While I'm talking about photos, I want to mention gThumb. gThumb is an image viewer that I've been using for a long time. I've used it's predecessor GQView, before the gThumb code base was forked and converted to GTK+ (at least I think that's what happened).

GNOME's default image viewer, Eye of Gnome, kind of sucks. It was totally unusable back in the day (before GNOME 2), and kind of works ok now, but is still not very good. gThumb kicks EOG's butt all the way.

gThumb does lossless JPEG rotations (although they really need to be on the toolbar, and they really need to be mapped to a hotkey; it's a really common operation!), photo album generation, and it's a good all round viewer.

I do wish the catalog support was a little better. I've been treating catalog like albums; all the pictures from a given day are put in a specific directory, and the good ones are put in a gThumb catalog. Then the catalog is used to make a web album. Adding pictures to catalog is a little onerous unfortunately, but not too bad.

Comment editing is a bit weak as well. It would be nice if one could edit comments in the photo properties dialog, but you can't because gThumb comments are not stored in the EXIF data for the file. They are stored separatly instead. That is the sensible thing to do if you want to be able to add comments to files without EXIF data in them, or to files which are in a format that does not allow for EXIF data.

Since catalog and comment data is not stored in the image file, moving files or renaming them outside of gThumb basic leads to losing any info that gThumb has attached to that file. If might be nice for gThumb to be able to manage "repositories" or "libraries" of photos, where it has complete control of the directory structure and metadata that goes with the images.

I propose libraries or repositories because it would be handy to be able to put all that data in different locations depending on disk space availability etc. It would also make it easier to set up shared photo libraries. That would be extremly useful on the iBook, where my wife and I have to manually copy files between our two iPhoto libraries, when we should be using only one copy. Using libraries would also make it possible to break up the amount of data that the program has to deal with at any one time; I've read that iPhoto does not deal well with extremely large numbers of photos.

The file system could be treated as a library, where the meta data such as comments and categories could be either disabled or stored the way it is now. I think being able to browse through the file system is one of the most useful things about gThumb. Perhaps my greatest annoyance with iPhoto and iTunes is that it is not possible to work with a file unless it has been imported into the respective program's library.