gThumb Image Viewer

What is gThumb Image Viewer?

gThumb has been around for many years and is packaged in the major distributions (Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu). It started as a simple viewer and grew into a full‑featured organizer, supporting RAW, EXIF and other metadata. The project is actively maintained, with the latest release 3.12.10 in early 2026.

The program targets users who need more than a basic viewer but don’t want a heavyweight Photoshop‑like suite. Photographers, hobbyists and anyone who likes to browse large image collections will find the catalog and library system useful. It feels like a native GNOME app: clean panels, keyboard‑driven navigation and smooth integration with the desktop background settings.

Compared with Ashampoo Photo Commander, gThumb is lighter and more keyboard‑centric. It lacks some of the commercial polish and bundled presets, but it offers all the essential operations—viewing, basic editing, batch conversion and cataloguing—without a price tag. If you’re moving from Windows, expect a more utilitarian interface and a reliance on GNOME shortcuts.

Best for: Users who want a fast, native‑looking image viewer with solid basic editing and cataloguing on Linux.

Key features of gThumb Image Viewer

• Supports BMP, JPEG, GIF (including animation), PNG, TIFF, TGA and RAW formats
• Displays EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata
• Basic editing: rotate, crop, scale, adjust saturation, lightness and contrast
• Batch operations: resize, format conversion, lossless JPEG transformations
• Thumbnail browsing with folder‑like file operations (copy, move, delete)
• Catalogs and libraries for organizing large collections
• Slideshow mode and ability to set images as desktop background
• Search by metadata and save results as a catalog

Tips for Windows users

gThumb reads the same file formats as Ashampoo, so you can open your existing folders directly. Learn the common shortcuts (e.g., ←/→ for next/previous, Ctrl+R to rotate, Ctrl+S to scale). Use the catalog feature to replace Ashampoo’s album system, and set images as wallpaper via the right‑click menu—no separate step needed.

Recent releases

• 3.12.10 — February 10, 2026

  This release fixes the following bug: - Fixed potential crash

• 3.12.9 — January 23, 2026

  This release fixes the following bugs: - Fixed compilation when lcms2 is disabled - Lossless rotation: make sure to modify the orientation tags only - Do not change the file modification time if the content did not change - Sharpen: allow to view the image at…

• 3.12.8.2 — November 30, 2025

  This release fixes the following bugs: - Fixed extensions dependencies - Only depend on libX11 if used (Chris Mayo) - Use GNOME module post_install (Matt Turner)

• 3.12.8.1 — October 26, 2025

  This release fixes the following bug: - Fixed compilation error (!360)