P eople who organise their image libraries using open source software know how difficult it is to find the perfect piece of software that can match all their needs. Traditionally, we’ve seen a yearslong competition between digiKam and Shotwell in that field, but sometimes you might need to have a lighter alternative at hand.
Perhaps that’s where gThumb, a GTK-based image viewer and organiser, can help. Lately it saw another update, which brought some amazing new features, so let’s see what version 3.12 of gThumb offers. The most-anticipated addition is support for modern image formats, such as HEIC, HEIF, AVIF and JXL (from the allnew JPEG XL that we cover as another pick below). You can now confidently view, edit, organise and export images using those next-generation formats. All of them assume smaller file sizes with a negligible loss in quality.