Gthumb in organizer/manager mode (click for full-sized image)

Even though I run a full fledged GNOME desktop on my Eee PC (mainly because of the sweet Dropbox integration), I still prefer to use lighter apps when at all possible, just to keep things moving along nicely on the sub-1Ghz processor.

I just need a decent image viewer, a way to grab images off of a digital camera, and some basic editing tools (resize, crop, rotate, etc). No reason to fire up the super powerful GIMP or the feature-full F-Spot just to perform some minor tasks on my low powered machine. When I went looking via Google and Synaptic, Gthumb kept popping up on my radar. Turns out, it’s exactly what I was looking for.

As an image viewer, it’s light and fast, and reads just about any common image format, including BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, ICO, XPM. It has the usual abilities you’d expect in an image viewer (zoom, rotate, fullscreen view) plus you can view your image in black and white and see EXIF data attached to JPEGs.

Gthumb also lets you organize your photos into albums and catalogs, as well as associate comments with images. You can, of course, search your images, and even save custom searches as albums! There’s also a handy export function that lets you create web-galleries on the fly. You can even easily whip up a slideshow to display full screen, with some nice transition effects.

When doing basic image editing, all the necessities are there, including resizing images, cropping, rotating, color adjustments, and the ability to save to a variety of formats.

Gthumb as image viewer. (click for full-size image)

I’ve already removed Eye of GNOME as my default image viewer on my Eee PC, and I’m now using Gthumb exclusively for all my basic image and photo-related tasks. If I want to get a little fancier, but I still don’t need to full power of GIMP, I’ll use MtPaint.

What are your favorite light image/photo tools?

Check it out: Gthumb Homepage