I recently decided to take advantage of Google’s automatic photo and video backup. Previously, I was using Sweet Home to synchronize them to my computer. I’m happier to have them in the cloud so I don’t have to worry about offsite backups, etc.
I took this opportunity to do a quick culling of my photos. I started off simply using the Nautilus file browser to view thumbnails and delete the cruft. I got annoyed with the nested directory structure of my photos, so I wrote a perl script to flatten it. After that, I found the thumbnails in Nautilus too small, so I started looking for other tools.
That’s when I discovered Geeqie. I fired it up in my photo directory, and I quickly figured out how to efficiently cull my photos. The key was using Geeqie’s marking capability, where you can “mark” photos with numbers 1–5. I simply used the up and down arrows to navigate through the photos, and marked photos I wanted deleted with mark 1 (by pressing the 1 key). To make the marks visible, I enabled the “Show Marks” option in the Select menu. After going through all the photos, I selected all photos with mark 1 (Ctrl + 1), deleted them (Ctrl + d), done!
Geequie made culling photos on my Linux machine a breeze!