As I’ve been taking a fair few pictures recently I’ve found that the easiest way for me to start “sifting” them is to load them onto the machine and run a quick slideshow. It’s simple, quick and allows me to start getting a feeling for which pictures are worth keeping. EOG, the graphics viewer that comes with Gnome is fine and does a nice slideshow, but it doesn’t handle the EXIF headers correctly. This is a shame as the camera sets the orientation correctly in the headers and it wouldn’t be too hard for EOG to detect the setting and rotate the pictures correctly so I could simply “open and view”. f-Spot did this but it’s a mono application and so won’t run on my desktop machine. Additionally it also created a duplicate of every picture which was mildly annoying and wasteful of my precious disk space on the laptop.

EOG refused to run on my AMD64 desktop under Gnome 2.12, but after an upgrade to 2.14 it’s happy and runs nicely. It still doesn’t rotate the images for me and also doesn’t change the orientation when I save an image after using one of it’s “rotate this way” buttons. This is really annoying and strikes me as being very wrong at worst and inconsistent at best.

2.14 corrects a few of the 64-bit problems that existed under 2.12 and seems slightly faster and smoother overall.