How to use the command line image viewer feh to do basic organizational tasks for photographs.

Digital photography creates image files in way larger quantities than film-based photography. Disk space is cheap and taking an other picture does not cost anything. New cameras create several types of image files and we invent new ways of processing them all the time. I find it much more convenient to have a number of simple UNIX-like tools that can be mixed and matched than trying to use an all-encompassing GUI tool that has its own work flow.

For many years I was happy user of QIV - Quick Image Viewer written for UNIX. I even contributed to its user interface to get it do exactly what I wanted. It used to be available for OS X through homebrew. Unfortunately, its last update is from 2013 and last year homebrew dropped it complaining that it has become impossible to compile.

My work flow with qiv was to copy all taken pictures from the camera memory card to chronologically named directories in my computer, view all JPG files and select images for either postprocessing by making a copy of them into a subdirectory or for deletion by moving them to an other subdirectory. Qiv has keyboard shortcuts for these functions.

Enter feh that is touted as being the best supported tool for image viewing. While it can do many things, vanilla feh definitely does not allow transient adjustment of image brightness, contrast and gamma using keys, nor can it remove or copy the viewed image file. Or can it?

feh has a feature called action keys. The number keys are programmable by custom shell commands.

The following two files, feh-copy.sh (gist) and feh-remove.sh (gist), take the pathname to a file as an argument and copy or move them to a subdirectory that first gets created if necessary. These scripts never destroy files. That will require additional manual steps to safeguard against accidental deletion.

#!/bin/sh
# ~/bin/feh-copy.sh
DIR=`dirname $1`
if [ ! -d $DIR/copied ]; then
    mkdir $DIR/copied
fi;
cp $1 $DIR/copied

#!/bin/sh
# ~/bin/feh-remove.sh
DIR=`dirname $1`
if [ ! -d $DIR/removed ]; then
    mkdir $DIR/removed
fi;
mv $1 $DIR/removed

After placing these files into ~/bin directory and making them executable, we can create an alias for feh using these scripts. q is obviously my old shorthand for qiv.

alias q='feh -FqVrY \
         --action1 "~/bin/feh-copy.sh %F" \
         --action3 "~/bin/feh-remove.sh %F"'

Inside a running feh (q *.JPG) you can press the 'a' key to see a reminder of these actions.

Once you have selected copies of files you want to work on and moved the unwanted ones, you return to the command line. I usually run feh on the removed subdirectory before deleting the contents with rm -rf removed.

If you have set up your camera like me, you have both JPG and raw image files in your working directory. You might want to delete the raw files that correspond to the just removed JPGs. I have written a perl script called orphan_raw (gist) for that.

Also, I sometimes want to work on raw files that correspond to the just selected JPGs. The script raw_copy (gist) makes copies of them in a subdirectory called raw where you process them. In my work flow, final images from all temporary subdirectories are eventually combined into a subdirectory w for 'worked-on'.