Being cheap, I manage images on my various machines with a range of free tools, briefly described here.

  • GNU Image Manipulation Program. can do anything, if you can figure it out, which I can’t. Still I’ve found it handy to crop an image to a specific aspect ratio.
  • ExifTool - I mostly use to remove the highly inconsistent orientation tag from images - see my jpgorhor.
  • ImageMagick is another command-line powertool I use, mostly for simple tasks such as montages, borders, text effects, blurring
  • LibreOffice Draw is handy for creating colourful schematics.
  • on Linux
    • feh (image viewer)
      • feh -F -D 4 full screen slide-show, changing every 4 seconds.
    • nomacs has excellent FEATURES, keyboard controlled, with easy resolution change or cropping of an image, so it’s my default viewer.
    • nsxiv has some handy features, in particular recursively thumbnailing images, so I wrap it in my $AjB/bashrc-wm
    • My $OSAB/ranger/rc.conf has a mapping to open the current directory in a new instance of rxvt-unicode such that I’m out of tmux, where I usually am, and I can use ranger to rapidly view images, alongside other filetypes, via w3mimgdisplay.
    • I wrap scanimage.1 in my $AjB/bashrc-wm for easy scanning from the command line.
  • MyPaint has some handy simple painting tools.
  • PGF/TikZ can make some stunning graphics, if you’re up for learning LaTeX, which is in itself a challenge…
  • Pinta (software) also has some handy features, in particular it shows the pixel position of your mouse pointer within the image.
  • on Windows
    • FastStone Image Viewer I use as my default
      • I always F12 (= Settings) > Viewer > [ Loop on, Auto-rotate by EXIF off, Default Unit > cm ]
    • IrfanView is a neat image viewer with some handy editing facilities and ability to access your scanner
      • I always tweak it: P (= Properties/Settings) > [JPG > Auto-rotate off Browsing > Cut White]