Geeqie

Geeqie is an open-source image viewer built for speed. It started life in 2008 as a fork of GQview, a well-liked viewer whose development had stalled, and it has been actively maintained ever since. The name mashes up "geeky" and "GQview", which says something about the project's sense of humor. What it doesn't say is how quick the thing is: point it at a folder holding thousands of photos, hefty RAW files included, and flipping through them feels close to instant.

Format support covers just about anything a photographer or image hoarder might have lying around: JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, WebP, HEIF, and RAW files from most camera makers. Metadata is a first-class citizen. The EXIF panel exposes camera settings, exposure data, GPS coordinates and more, and you can search and filter your collection on any of it. Keywords can be arranged hierarchically, which keeps tagging manageable once a library grows past a few thousand files.

Where Geeqie really earns its keep is culling and comparing. You can line up two, three or four images side by side, zoom them in lockstep, and pick the sharpest frame out of a burst. Collections group images from different folders without moving a single file, and marks give you a fast way to flag keepers before copying or deleting in bulk. Version 3.3, released in October 2026, reworked collections and the open-recent dialog on top of the 3.x series' migration from GTK3 to GTK4.

Geeqie deliberately does not edit images. Instead it hands them off: you configure external editors such as GIMP, darktable or RawTherapee, and send the current file over with a single keystroke. That keeps the viewer lean (the AppImage is about 114 MB and it runs happily on aging hardware) while still slotting into a real editing workflow. The layout is configurable too: panels can be rearranged, split or hidden until the window looks the way you work.

The honest caveats: the interface looks like a Linux utility rather than a polished consumer app, advanced options take some digging, and this is a Linux-first project. It ships in most distribution repositories, plus Flatpak and AppImage, and supports other Unix-like systems, but Windows and macOS users are not the target audience and will have a better time elsewhere.

If your problem sounds like "I have tens of thousands of photos and I need to view, sort and tag them fast", Geeqie is one of the best answers on any platform, and it costs nothing.