Geeqie is the successor of GQview.

I wrote a small Python script to edit Exif UserComment tag. You can hook the script to the external editor commands of Geeqie, so you can launch it with a simple Ctrl+1.

The program allows multi line comments, uses UTF-8 encoding and allow you to edit and existing comment or add a new one. You can navigate in the directory tree and quickly add comments using just the jeyboard.

The exif-comment-edit script uses the exiv2(1) tool to actually read and write the comment, on a Debian system you must install the exiv2 and python-gtk2 packages.

The script is released under the GPL license, and you can download it from SourceForge.

To add the item to the Edit menu, just create a $HOME/.config/geeqie/applications/exif-comment-edit.desktop file, with:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Edit Exif UserComment

Exec=exif-comment-edit %f

# show only if exif-comment-edit is installed
TryExec=exif-comment-edit

# Desktop files that are usable only in Geeqie should be marked like this:
Categories=X-Geeqie;
OnlyShowIn=X-Geeqie;

# Show in menu "Edit"
X-Geeqie-Menu-Path=EditMenu/EditSection

MimeType=image/jpeg;

To bind the menu item to a shortcut key, open the Edit, Preferences, Keyboard dialog box and search the action you just added.

I wrote a Python script to show Exif data from photos, with special decoding of Canon PowerShot S120 metadata. The script is intended to be run on the command line, but you can bind it to a keyboard shortcut in Geeqie, thus launching it when viewing an image. This is the canon-metadata.desktop file you have to put into your $HOME/.config/geeqie/applications/ directory:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=View Canon Metadata

Exec=xterm -geometry 76x25+10+10 -bg white -fg black -fa 'Monospace' -fs 12 -e "bash -c 'canon-metadata %f | less'"

# show only if canon-metadata is installed
TryExec=canon-metadata

# Desktop files that are usable only in Geeqie should be marked like this:
Categories=X-Geeqie;
OnlyShowIn=X-Geeqie;

# Show in menu "Edit"
X-Geeqie-Menu-Path=EditMenu/EditSection

MimeType=image/jpeg;

You can download the actual Python script from this page Canon PowerShot S120.