Organize your photo collection with Geeqie Art Sorted

Smartphones above all, lure holiday makers into taking huge numbers of spontaneous snapshots. At home, you then face the task of filtering out the unusable photos of the church with half a steeple and the unknown cyclist who photobombed your landscape. Geeqie [1] is a lean image viewer that can help you with this. It was created as an enhancement of the GQview [2] image viewer, which was discontinued in 2006, and is now found in the repositories of many distributions.

Unlike many competitors, Geeqie is extremely fast and is easy to use. When viewing the data, a zoom function and a preview with different modes are a big help. The application also starts a slide show at the touch of a button. The "File Formats" box shows which image types the software can handle in version 1.5 or newer. Actions such as deleting, moving, and renaming are carried out via the user interface, usually by drag and drop. Virtual photo albums let you collect topically related images.

Furthermore, Geeqie provides insights into the metadata of the images if they are in EXIF, IPTC, or XMP format. If necessary, you can add tags to the photos and rate them. If the metadata contain the snapshot location's GPS coordinates, the program visualizes them as a point on an OpenStreetMap map.

Geeqie has a deduplication feature that even compares the content of images when needed. In contrast to its competitors, however, the functions for post-processing the images are limited. They are essentially limited to rotating in 90-degree steps, mirroring, and flipping. You require external tools for all further changes.

Included

Most distributions let you install Geeqie via the software manager. If you fail to find the program there, go to the project homepage and make your choice of distribution in the Download and Installation section below the Linux heading. Armed with this information, the server then sends you to a page with a corresponding package. However, in some cases, it will redirect to an older version or to a nonexistent page.

If there is no package for the distribution you are using, you can pick up the source code from GitHub [3]. How to build and install the program is explained in the "Build Helper" box. In this case, you are responsible for updates during manual installation.

$ sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev liblcms2-dev libexiv2-dev liblirc-dev lirc libchamplain-gtk-0.12-dev libchamplain-0.12-dev libclutter-1.0-dev liblua5.1-0-dev librsvg2-common libwmf0.2-7-gtk gawk markdown libffmpegthumbnailer-dev libpoppler-glib-dev libimage-exiftool-perl liblcms2-utils imagemagick exiftran gphoto2 ufraw exiv2 libheif-dev libwebp-dev libdjvulibre-dev intltool

$./autogen.sh.
$ make
$ sudo make install

Trinity

After launching, the three-panel main window appears (Figure 1). In the top left corner, navigate to the directory with the photos that Geeqie lists bottom left. As soon as you click on an image, it will appear on the right side. The directory tree in the upper left corner may be a little too small for your liking. To adjust the size of the three panels, mouse over the separator. As soon as it turns into a double arrow, drag and drop the separator.

Figure 1: If you launch Geeqie from a terminal window, the program automatically displays the photos from the current directory.

If you will be working in the same directory regularly in the future, it makes sense to bookmark it. Click on the plus sign and assign a name to the new shortcut at the top, for example, Cologne 2019. Navigate to the desired folder in the list and press OK. The shortcut appears in the top left corner of the list above the green plus sign; after clicking on it, the software takes you directly to the linked directory.

The list of photos in the lower left corner is sorted alphabetically by file name. To change this, click on Sort by Name in the status bar and select a new criterion. The options in the status bar include the memory space the photos occupy in the directory, the dimensions in pixels, and the file size of the currently displayed image. In another field Geeqie reveals the zoom level at which it is currently showing the photo.

Matter of Opinion

Geeqie rotates photos independently if the metadata contains alignment information. To disable this automation, select Edit | Orientation | Exif Rotate. The other menu items under Edit | Orientation let you rotate, flip, and mirror the photo manually.

Geeqie tries to display the colors correctly using the color profile contained in the photo. If this goes wrong, disable the View | Color Management | Enable Color Management item in the menu.

The fastest way to control Geeqie is to use keyboard shortcuts. You can also access almost all of the functions via the menu. To zoom in and out of the image, you can select View | Zoom, or press + and -. X fits the image to the window, while Z restores it to the original size. To go to the next image in the list, click on the image or press the space bar. In the image stock, you can navigate with the mouse scroll wheel, or simply press Up and Down. All other keyboard shortcuts are listed on the page that appears when you select Help | Keyboard Shortcuts.

However, this is a time-consuming way of perusing your image stock. You can do this more quickly with the small thumbnails that you can call up by pressing T. Ctrl+I shows you a small light table view (Figure 2); Ctrl+L returns you to the list. You can also press F to toggle to full-screen mode and back.

Figure 2: You can adjust the size of the thumbnails in the Edit | Preferences | General tab.

Slide Show

In addition, S starts and stops a slide show, which runs directly in the main window. Its speed can be adjusted by pressing Ctrl++ and Ctrl+-. If you right-click on a directory, the context menu lets you start a recursive slide show. Geeqie will then include the photos in all subdirectories.

View | Pan View tells Geeqie to display the photos in other overviews (Figure 3), by default as a timeline. Go to original in the context menu shifts the corresponding photo into the main window.

Figure 3: The Timeline drop-down list in the panel view lets you switch to this Calendar. Clicking on a date shows you all the photos taken on that day.

Pressing Ctrl+K unfolds a sidebar with more information (Figure 4). Among other things, you can see a histogram of the image, assign keywords, and enter a comment if required. You can either check the boxes for the keywords in the list or enter your own in the field to the left. Rating lets you assign a rating to the image.

Figure 4: The individual information can be displayed and hidden by clicking on the black triangles.

In the lower part of the information, you will find all the EXIF metadata stored by the camera, as well as the recording location on an OpenStreetMap map. You can add missing information by pressing the plus button. If you cannot access some information, this probably means that Geeqie was compiled without the required support.

Love of Order

The list of photos on the left side and the directory selection work like a file manager: You can drag a photo and drop it in another directory. The application will then ask if you want to copy or move the image. If you hold down Ctrl, you can select several photos and move them at the same time. New directories are created with File | New directory.

If your camera has dumped all the photos in a single directory, the Sort Manager helps you to sort them. To bring it up, press Shift+S. Make sure that the drop-down list shows Folders. The Sort Manager offers the option of copying or moving the photos to the desired directories (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The Sort Manager helps you move or copy the images to directories of your choice.

You can use the plus symbol at the bottom of the Sort Manager to create a shortcut for each target directory. Select the first photo in the file list in the lower left corner of the main window. Then, in Sort Manager, click the shortcut to which you want to assign the image. Geeqie immediately switches to the next image. Now click on the appropriate shortcut in the Sort Manager again. Continue with this until all the photos are in the desired directory.

In addition, the software offers to assign the photos to virtual photo albums, also known as Collections. In this way, you can keep all the photos of your new house build together, even if the photos actually reside in different directories. To do this, first create a New Collection in the File menu; then drag the desired photos into the empty window. Pressing Ctrl+S saves the collection; you can load it later on by pressing O. A double-click on a photo opens it in the main window; you can use drag and drop to arrange images in the desired order.

Double Deal

F3 displays the search function on the screen. At the top, first define the directory where you want Geeqie to search. If you select Recurse, the tool also looks in subdirectories. Below you can select all the criteria that apply to the photos you are looking for (Figure 6).

Figure 6: In this example, Geeqie would find all images that include the abbreviation IMG in their filenames and that measure 640x480 pixels.

To get rid of duplicate images, call File | Find Duplicates, and use Compare by to select a criterion. Name tells Geeqie to report files with identical filenames, while Similarity tells the program to report photos with similar image content. Drag all the images you want to compare onto the large white area. The list contains all the photos that Geeqie classifies as similar (Figure 7).

Figure 7: In the first column, Geeqie reveals how similar the photos are. The bottom image matches the one directly above it (without a percentage) with a probability of 87 percent.

Which sunset snapshot is the best? You answer such questions via View | Split | Quad. Geeqie now displays four photos side by side on the right (Figure 8). You can, for example, click on the photo top right and select a different photo from the list bottom left. Changing the two photos at the bottom follows the same principle – this makes it really easy to compare four shots. The program always applies all actions to the photo with the red frame. Pressing Y returns you to the normal view.

Figure 8: As an alternative view, Geeqie places two photos one on top of the other or next to each when you press E or U.

Pressing 1 tells Geeqie to attach (or remove) a yellow sticky note numbered 1 to the currently displayed photo. You can use the number keys from 2 to 0 to attach up to nine more sticky notes to the photo. What you use the tags for is up to you. For example, you could tag all potential deletion candidates with 1 first.

M shows boxes that represent the individual tags in the bottom left corner of the file list. Checking the first box from the left, assigns the 1 tag to the photo. If you check a box in the top line, Geeqie will only display photos with the appropriate tag. Pressing Ctrl and one of the numbers lets you select all tagged images at once.

Conclusions

Geeqie is an extremely fast and stable image viewer with which you can quickly view and sort even large amounts of images. The program works with folders, which you can also access with other image processing programs. You also need to do this if you want to edit your snapshots at some point. Further information on Geeqie's operating principle is provided by a fairly sparse reference accessible via Help | Contents.