If you take many pictures from events or sport matches you certainly know the problem of separating the good pictures from the trash. Most image manipulation programs like are too heavy to use them for sorting the pictures. However, there exists a very light-weighted tool for Linux (and Solaris and FreeBSD): qiv, Quick Image Viewer. Although the download has only about 100KB (provided that gtk+/gdk and Imlib are installed), it offers an incredible number of functions.

Under Ubuntu the installation of qiv is very easy sudo apt-get install qiv. After the installation, qiv can be started using the command qiv where path can be a file or a folder whose content should be displayed. In addition to this pure paths, operators like the * are also possible, for exampleqiv *.jpg opens all .jpg-files in the current folder.

When qiv is the current window and displays an image, many commands (use man qiv for an exhaustive list) can be used. Actually I use only a few of them. The most frequently used commands are:

• space bar: display next picture
• backspace: display previous picture
• Page Up: go five pictures forward
• Page Down: go five pictures backward
• d: delete the currently displayed image
• u: undelete the previously deleted image
• q: close qiv

When you delete an image it is actually not deleted but moved to a folder .qiv-trash (in the folder of the pictures), so it can be recovered later. At the end of the sorting, it is quite wise to delete this folder using rm -rf .qiv-trash to save some space.

Using qiv I have managed to considerably speed up the tedious task of sorting the images before editing and publishing the good ones.