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.
August 2007: Pho 0.9.5.1
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Lots of cool new improvements.
Optimized for gtk2, but should still build on a gtk1 system.
New "presentation mode" does fullscreen (no window borders).
It also checks your environment for
Grab pho-0.9.5.tar.gz.
Let me know if you have problems.
And there's a Windows binary too! pho-0.9.5-pre5.zip, thanks to Michael Schumacher. (This is labelled 0.9.5-pre5, but there have been no changes between pre5 and the final 0.9.5.) You'll need to install gtk+ if you don't already have it.
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. You can convert those to other formats using the ImageMagick utility.
Pho can delete images on disk, but it can't save rotated images yet. I use my imagebatch scripts for that.
Source tarball: Pho 0.9.5 source tarball.
Windows binary (requires gtk+): pho-0.9.5-pre5.zip.
Dependencies: pho uses the gtk+ libraries, including gdk-pixbuf. You may need to edit the Makefile if your system has these libraries 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.
If you like pho, or if you think it's promising but there's some feature it really needs ... let me know!