I finally found the photo manager for me to use in Linux. I'd tried all the major apps, but none of them worked properly with the Olympus .orf raw format. Even the leader, FSpot, wouldn't display the images. It relies on an embedded JPG thumbnail inside the raw image, but my Oly camera doesn't put that image there.

I had originally started working on writing my own in Python, but I haven't really had the time to dedicate to it. I had heard about an application called GQview, but it turned out that it wouldn't display my raw images either.

Then I heard about Geeqie Viewer which is a branch off of the GQview program. GQview hasn't been actively developed in some time, so in the true open source tradition someone took the original source and revamped it while adding new features.

If you're like me and want to access a library of photos on multiple computers possibly from thumbdrives, DVD or external hard drives, going with a program that keeps it's own internal database just won't work. Geeqie allows you to just use folders for organizing your photos, while giving you the ability to still add keywords and comments.

By default Geeqie will use it's own internal database, but with a checkbox or two you can tell it to store the metadata either within the image itself or as a separate file or .metadata directory right beside the images. With that method, you can move your images around, put them on removable media or what have you and still search for all photos with pictures of family and snow for instance.

Geeqie allows you to view as much or as little information about your photos as you want - from a simple image view to a complete histogram and EXIF information. The interface is very customizable. One downside I've found is that the metadata searching while not using it's internal database is a bit slow, as expected. I also found that my Olympus RAW images came out a bit darker than they would in LightZone, but given that it will even read them I see that as a plus.

Geeqie is simply an image management and viewer application though. It doesn't do image editing at all. It does allow you to specify other external programs to use for editing however, so for people like me who would use a combination of LightZone, Gimp and maybe even qtpfsgui for image editing, this is the glue that binds them together.

Geeqie is available through the Ubuntu repositories, so just use Synaptic or your favorite package manager to install it.