I was playing a bit with qeeqie since i read on wikipedia about all the its features, despite the strange UI and outdated looks it seems to be one of the most feature-complete viewers available for linux, and one of the very few that has color-management options.

One of the things i wanted to try was image cropping, which is provided by a plugin bundled with the package, but out of the box it doesn't work because (I found out) it needs exiftool. Once installed from SBo, the plugin STILL doesn't work! Editing the plugin preferences, which is basically a .desktop file describing the plugin functionality and containing the command to run, I found that it's trying to call the command "geeqie-image-crop", but this was not in my path, I finally found it in /usr/lib/geeqie, together with all other plugins commands.
Once corrected the path to the command in the plugin configuration file, then it starts working and you can crop.

If anyone is curious about, the cropping process is a bit strange.
Basically you need to enable Edit->Draw Rectangle, then select a rectangle on the image by click and dragging, then click Plugins->Image Crop, and finally the crop is shown in a new window, where you can save it on disk.

My question here is the following: despite missing exiftool in base slackware, which makes the plugin unusable, one still has to deal with broken paths to plugins commands. What should we do to correct this?
Is the plugins path something that can be configured by the build script, then they could be placed somewhere in PATH?
Or perhaps its better to patch the plugin .desktop configs and make them point to the right paths in /usr/lib?

Far out, that is freaky... I have just begun following the same path for the same reasons... I'm a step behind you though, so thanks for your info to get it working!
I had noted that the "geeqie-image-crop" script also needs zenity, but only for showing error messages, so it obviously can't complain about zenity not being present :-)

I would think a simple patch to the .desktop file would be the easiest option if it's just a matter of tweaking the path to the plugin.

For me geeqie failed with convertion png --> jpeg.

All of geeqie's plug-in's are in /usr/lib/geeie/, even on an X86_64 system.