pho is a lightweight program for viewing large numbers of images quickly, rotating or deleting some, 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.
7/13/2004: a new release is imminent. Lots of cool new improvements. Works in gtk2 if you have it, but should still build on a gtk1 system. New "presentation mode" to do fullscreen (no window borders). If you want to help test it, grab pho-0.9.5-pre2.tar.gz. Let me know if you have problems.
I used to use xv for paging through images -- it's quite a good 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 after that 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:
Since I wrote pho several years ago, I keep hearing about other image viewers, and thinking maybe pho was redundant. But I recently did a search, and couldn't come up with any other image viewers that are similarly efficient for paging through large collections of images. So I guess I'll keep maintaining pho!
Pho can read any format supported by gdk-pixbuf. I haven't found a list of those formats anywhere, but it seems to be substantial. The only format I've hit so far that it doesn't read is photocd. I usually use hpcdtoppm for PhotoCDs.
Pho can delete images on disk, but it can't save rotated images yet. I use my imagebatch scripts for that.
Dependencies: 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). Also included is a little xlib program, xpho, which is mostly interesting as an example of how to use gdk_pixbuf_xlib.
Pho does work on Mac OS X, as an X application if you have the appropriate gtk/gdk headers and libraries. Here's a mac binary (0.8, somewhat out of date). It's built on OS X 10.2.2 and requires XFree86, gtk+, and gdk-pixbuf (available as fink packages -- fink install gdk-pixbuf will get all of it, but it may take a while if you don't already have the gnome libraries).
I believe there's a gdk-pixbuf for Windows, but lacking a Windows development machine I haven't tried it. I don't think it's available for Mac Classic. (But you're welcome to use the skeleton of the program and insert your own platform specific image drawing code; if you send it to me I'd love to incorporate it into the pho source.)
If you like pho, or if you think it's promising but there's some feature it really needs ... let me know!