Pho 0.9.5

Pho project 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.
Why another image viewer? Surely there are plenty of those?
I used to use xv for paging through images -- its 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:
- Rotate images by multiples of 90 degrees, and remember the rotations.
- Delete bad images.
- Copy a few of the best horizontals to my Backgrounds (wallpaper) directory.
- Note which images I might want to put on a web page (after resizing).
With xv, I found that I was writing these lists on paper, or trying to keep track of them in my head. Thats dumb! Why not make the computer do that work? So I did.
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 couldnt come up with any other image viewers that are similarly efficient for paging through large collections of images. So I guess Ill keep maintaining pho!
Pho can read any format supported by gdk-pixbuf. I havent found a list of those formats anywhere, but it seems to be substantial. The only format Ive hit so far that it doesnt read is photocd. You can convert those to other formats using the ImageMagick utility.
Pho can delete images on disk, but it cant save rotated images yet. I use my imagebatch scripts for that.
Enhancements:
- Several useful new features were added.
- Lots of bugs were fixed.
- Stability, focus handling, and window management were improved.
- A "presentation mode" was added, which sets the application to be fullscreen with no window borders or mouse pointer.
- The PHO_ARGS environment variable was added for default arguments.
- The user can now zoom in or out (to double or half size).