π

gThumb for Managing Photographs

Show Sidebar

Somebody reading my article about managing photographs was suggesting the GNU/Linux image viewer gThumb which works on the GNOME deskop. After playing around with it for an hour, I come to the conclusion that gThumb respects the JPEG files in the file system which is good.

However, when I do rename files outside of gThumb, I end up in losing files in «catalogs». The «organize» feature to put all photographs in catalogs according to their date does not replace my one-directory-per-event strategy. No idea, what «selections» are for.

Keyboard support is not as good as I need it to be.

The online help does not explain basic concepts as «collections», «libraries», «selections» which is a big pitty.

Generated meta-data is scattered across the file system: .comments sub-directory of the JPEG file (title, description, ...), $HOME/.config/gthumb/ (filters, history, tags), $HOME/.local/share/gthumb/catalogs (libraries and catalogs). All of them are using absolute path names which is the reason for losing connections when renaming files. Moving JPEG files in a different directory also results in broken catalogs, libraries and lost description/title meta-data.

gThumb only seems to work when the user doesn't touch any JPEG file in the file system. Impossible to rename files, move files or directories, or move whole sets of files for archiving reasons.

Most probably all JPEG files need to stay in one directory since organizing is done only with gThumb-meta-data. No warning about lost files or lost meta-data. It has only a limited support for organizing sets of JPEG files the way I want it.

Not my choice of software I'd say.


Related articles that link to this one:

Comment via email (persistent) or via Disqus (ephemeral) comments below: