You can also try feh (https://feh.finalrewind.org/) feh is an X11 image viewer aimed mostly at console users. And sxiv (https://github.com/muennich/sxiv) Simple X Image Viewer (but this one was archived on github since Nov. 9th, 2022) and now replaced with nsxiv (https://github.com/nsxiv/nsxiv) Neo (or New or Not) Simple (or Small or Suckless) X Image Viewer.
https://github.com/muennich/sxiv
Well this is going to be confusing.
I can't offer extra recommendations, but just wanted to offer full agreement.
GLib is the awesome standard library I get to use everywhere thanks to gobject-introspection. From work projects in Vala, window manager¹, image viewer², video player³. It is especially useful with lua configurable projects, given the sparsity of the language itself.
² https://github.com/muennich/sxiv - my user configs are lua & lgi, extended with gexiv2 also via gobject-introspection.