Imagefile handling?

[Juhana Sadeharju <kouhia nic funet fi>]

Hello.

What is preferred way to deal with imagefiles?

Many image viewer applications simply opens up a large X11 pixmap
and thus they freeze if the image is 2000x2000 (say). Also, when
I zoom in to a large image in gqview, the zoomed image is again
one large pixmap -- like 8000x8000 if I zoom at ratio 4:1. This
brings the system down.

Therefore, I need routines which handles imagefiles more better.
Any available?

GIMP seems to handle imagefiles correctly as the system is not
brought on knees there. Are those imagefile routines available
as a standalone easy-to-use library?

Has gdk-pixbuf a tile + disk cache system? What if I want load only
a small area from the imagefile? It looks like gdk_pixbuf_loader_set_size()
provides only a rescale operation but not a grop operation.

The less code I have to write or modify, the better.

Regards,
Juhana