== A surprising lack on Linux: browsers for camera RAW photos

Linux has a reasonably good set of open source programs for processing
and editing photographs shot in the various camera RAW formats ([[ufraw
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/]] is the one I have the most exposure
to).  But, to my surprise, it seems to be mostly lacking image viewers
that I could use to browse through my pictures to pick out the ones
that are actually worth processing. Or at least image viewers that
meet my criteria, which include [['must not want to own the world'
../programming/PhotoEditingNote]].

(This criteria disqualifies DigiKam and F-Spot, among others, although
apparently at least F-Spot may have a mode that avoids that issue.)

Of the programs I've looked at so far:

* ImageMagick can display RAWs, but only by running them through [[ufraw]],
  which is both overkill and very slow.

  (It is overkill because basically all RAW formats already include a
  full-sized JPEG version of the picture, as well as a thumbnail. So
  a quick browser doesn't really need to understand and process all
  the actual RAW formats, it just needs to extract the JPEG version,
  for which there are well-developed libraries.)

* [[ufraw]] has no browsing at all.
* Raw Therapee and [[Rawstudio http://rawstudio.org/]] can both browse
  but they're more processing and editing applications.

  (Also, Raw Therapee isn't open source, just free, and [[Rawstudio]]
  currently doesn't like my camera's RAWs.)

* gthumb sort of mostly works but with various issues, as does geeqie
  (with more issues).

There are probably other RAW-capable image browsers and viewers that are
packaged for Fedora, but this is where I make a grumpy observation that
Fedora doesn't seem to have a web page that breaks down Fedora RPMs by
category.

(Also, there's a mid-2008 discussion of this general subject
[[here http://jcornuz.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/what-is-a-good-image-viewer/]].)