pho: View and annotate multiple images

pho (pronounced like the first syllable in "photo") 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.

Skip to the download section.

Why another image viewer? Surely there are plenty of those?

Back in the early days of Linux (and, before that, Unix), I used to use a program called xv for paging through images. It was quite a good viewing program, but it was non-free and had a few bugs and quirks that annoyed me. But, more important, there were a few extra features I wanted.

I take a lot of photos. During image triage, I need to be able to do a few things quickly:

• Rotate images by multiples of 90 degrees, and remember the rotations in case I want to rotate the files on disk after I'm done viewing.
• Delete bad images.
• Note which images I might want to put on a web page, or otherwise treat specially, like emailing them to a friend or using them for desktop wallpaper.

Since I first wrote pho back in 2002, I keep hearing about other image viewers, and thinking maybe pho was redundant. But I'm still not sure any modern image viewer is 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 includes most common formats. It doesn't read GIMP's native XCF, and it doesn't read PhotoCD. It reads some cameras' raw formats but not others. Unfortunately I don't have any control over gdk-pixbuf's format list.

Pho can delete images on disk, but it can't save rotated images. It merely prints out the list of images that need to be rotated. I use my imagebatch scripts for that, or you can use a commandline utility like ImageMagick (which is what my imagebatch scripts use under the hood).

How to use pho

space

Go to next image.

backspace, -

Go to previous image.

r, t, right-arrow

Rotate right (clockwise).

R, T, l, L, left-arrow

Rotate left (counter-clockwise).

up-arrow

Rotate 180 degrees.

home

Go back to the first image.

d

Bring up a delete dialog (another d deletes the file)

i

Show information about the image (includes EXIF info and JPEG comment, if any).

0-9

Tag the image with a number. These tag lists will be printed out when you exit.

f

Toggle in and out of "full size mode" (show the image at its native size, even if that's too big to fit on screen)

F

Toggle in and out of "full screen mode" (make the image as big as it can be and still fit on the screen).

p

Toggle in and out of Presentation Mode (full screen, no mouse or window borders)

-, /

Zoom out, to half size

+, =, *

Zoom in, to double size o

Pop up a file selector to change the working file list (New replaces all the old images, Add just adds new files to the list)

g

Run gimp on this image (or set PHO_CMD to an alternate command).

q

Quit.

Keywords Mode

Keywords mode uses the same note flags that Pho has always had, but gives you an easier way to annotate a directory of images with strings. You can type in phrases for each note, and you can have up to 31 notes now, not just 10. If you use Pho to categorize your photos, you'll find Keywords mode very handy.

(By the way, if you want to do more serious tagging of images, you might be interested in my metapho app. As I started to extend Pho's Keywords mode even further, I realized that tagging and viewing were two different things, and rather than try to shoehorn real tagging into Pho I'd be better off starting with an entirely different user interface. Pho and Metapho work well as separate apps, and complement each other.)

In Keywords mode you can also type in a unique image comment for each image. Comments aren't tied to the numbered image flags -- each image has its own comment.

There's also a new slideshow mode, where you specify the interval in seconds (e.g. pho -p -s5 for a 5-second delay between images). You can use this for a screensaver, or just to go through slides automatically. Hitting the spacebar cancels slideshow mode.

You can now customize the command called up with the 'g' key. It defaults to gimp (not gimp-remote as in previous pho versions), but you can call any program you like, e.g. view the current image in firefox with export PHO_CMD="firefox %s" -- don't forget the %s for the filename!

Download: Getting pho

Latest source tree: Pho is now hosted on Github, and you can always get the latest source tree there, as well as file bugs or otherwise participate. Click on "Clone or download" for a download link -- unfortunately, GitHub only offers zip files, not tarballs.

Current released version: pho-1.0.tar.gz. (source tarball).

Ancient Windows binary (requires gtk+): pho-0.9.5-pre5.zip. (Thanks to Michael Schumacher!)

Mac users: Pho definitely does work on Mac OS X: my husband uses it frequently. You need the appropriate gtk/gdk headers and libraries. I've only seen it used as an X11 application, but in theory it should be able to run with the new experimental native gtk libraries too.

BSD users: pho should build just fine on *BSD if you have the required libraries. If it doesn't, please let me know.

Dependencies:

To compile pho, you'll need a C compiler such as gcc, plus gtk+, and all the libraries it depends on. For example, on Debian or Ubuntu, this command should get you what you need:

aptitude install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev

If you like pho, or if you think there's some feature it really needs ... let me know! Or file an issue on GitHub.

Changelog