pho: View and annotate multiple images
...Akkana
pho is a lightweight program for viewing large numbers of
images at once, and making notes about what to do with each image --
for instance, for going through hundreds of
images after uploading them from a digital camera.
Why another image viewer? Surely there are plenty of those?
I used to use xv for paging through images -- it's an excellent
viewing program -- but it had a few features which annoyed me. For
example, it creates a directory called .xvpics in every directory it touches;
and if an image has to be resized to fit the screen, and you save it
(perhaps after rotating it), it saves at the smaller size and boom,
there goes your high-res image.
But, more important, there were a few extra things I needed.
During image triage, I need to be able to do a few things quickly:
- Rotate images by +/- 90 degrees, and remember the rotations.
- Delete bad images.
- Copy a few of the best horizontals to my Backgrounds (wallpaper) directory.
- Note which images I might want to put on a web page (after resizing).
With xv, I found that I was writing these lists on paper, or trying
to keep track of them in my head. That's dumb! Why not make the
computer do that work?
Currently, pho doesn't make any changes to the files on disk.
I use my imagebatch scripts for that.
How to use pho
Usage: pho *.jpg (or whatever).
It will show the first image, scaled for your screen if needed.
Then the following keys work:
- space
- Go to next image.
- backspace, -
- Go to previous image.
- r, t, right-arrow
- Rotate right (clockwise).
- R, T, left-arrow
- Rotate left (counter-clockwise).
- up-arrow
- Rotate 180 degrees.
- d
- Mark for deletion.
- i
- Show information about the image.
- 0-9
- Add this image to the appropriate list.
- q
- Quit.
pho will remember the correct (last) rotation for each image.
When it exits (either because the last image was viewed or because
the user typed q), it will print out the images that need to be
rotated and deleted (it does not actually change the files on disk),
and the images which were added to numbered lists.
(For example, list 1 might be the images I want to use as wallpaper,
and list 5 might be the images I want to make into a web page.)
Getting pho
pho uses the
gdk_pixbuf
library for reading, scaling, and displaying images.
So you will need gdk-pixbuf installed in order to run pho.
To compile it, you will also need gdk-pixbuf-devel.
You may need to edit the Makefile if your system has gdk-pixbuf
installed in different place from my system (sorry, no autoconf yet).
As far as I know, gdk-pixbuf is Unix only, so this program won't
work on Windows or Mac machines. (But you're welcome to use the
skeleton of the program and insert your own platform specific
image drawing code.)
pho binary for Linux i386 (compiled on Redhat 7.3)
pho source tarball
If you like pho, or if you think it's promising but there's some
feature it really needs, or have an idea for a better name for it
... let me know!
Changelog
- 7/3/2002, Pho 0.4:
- Fixed a bug with gif rotation.
- 7/1/2002, Pho 0.3:
- Rename yass to pho, add info dialog.
- 6/28/2002, Yass 0.2
- Some added features; add manual and make install target.
- 6/24/2002, Yass 0.1:
- First release.
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