Introduction

gThumb is a Linux program for viewing and managing your photos and contains many useful functions. But because the documentation - read: the help function - is quite brief, somewhat outdated and for some parts simply missing, I think the real power of gThumb remains somewhat underexposed. Let's change that!

gThumb is a photo browser for the Linux platform (plus BSD, Solaris and Unix) and can be installed via the software manager. It does what all other photo browsers do, namely show your photos! All common formats including raws are shown, but dng files (Adobe Digital Negative) and 32-bit tiffs are not displayed.

Tricks

gThumb has been around for a long time, but I only really got to know it when I made the Dutch translation for version 2.6, in 2018. Since then it has been my standard photo browser. Some of the tricks that I really appreciate are:

Send a raw or jpg/etc. to Darktable, RawTherapee, Gimp or another photo editor, or convert it with dcraw to an 8- or 16-bit ppm or tif; all this with a single shortcut.

Quickly select a number of photos from a photo session using a flag, reduce them by 50%, change the gamma value per photo if needed and send them directly to a new album in Flickr. Lightning fast!

You can also turn the above set into an image wall, in which all photos are transformed to a small square format without margins and written to a single overview photo.

Or create a contact sheet. Here you have the choice between rectangular or square thumbnails, now with margin, with the file name (or more) below them. Handy for archive purposes.

Make your own file filters: show only tiff or only png, or ...

Rename a series of photos: for example, add your name, camera model or exposure settings like shutter speed, aperture or iso to the name.

Rotate a series of photos.

Set the date of a series of photos back to the original date; can be useful if the photos were copied over a network (they will get the date they were copied) or if you accidentally set the date of your camera incorrectly.

Create catalogs (or categories), for example 'good_shots', and collect your good shots there. Or create a library, like Holidays, and add catalogs such as Germany 2018, France 2019, etc. The photos in these categories are not copied to separate folders. So there's no contamination of the hard disk but you have still direct access to a collection.

And more...

In short, the proverbial Swiss pocket knife for the photographer! The following articles provide a brief overview of this great program, click on the hyperlinks at the top left to read on.

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5/2019