App for viewing photos with properties (exif) display?

The default photo viewer (eog) will show metadata. If you open your photo, right click and select Properties. It will open a window that lists the metadata. You can then switch between photos and keep the metadata open beside it.

Try

gthumb

It is a powerful image viewer with many awesome features. I'm not sure if it can show the data next to the images, but you don't need to add a library.

If you enable the side pane in eog (View menu - you can get this info at the side as well.

To enable this btw you need to have the exif display plugin enabled in preferences. If you do not have this plugin, install eog-plugins .