improving experience on viewing pictures

ohh, the question is: can you suggest something that full fills the goals above?

my setup:
* I am using Xmonad for window manager
* pcmanfm for filemanager
* gthumb as image viewer

this setup is not really a great marriage.

The problem is: I usually have some images in a folder, that; surprise: I
would like to look at.
so I use the filemanager, and browse to the pictures, I then press enter,
xmonad handles the layout... everything is great.

After this; I would like to open another image by clicking on it from the
filebrowser... this only works if I close gthumb.
Or, I would like to change the image I am looking at using the arrow keys,
which doesn't work

---- Basicaly what I would like to do.
1) open a picture using some filemanager + mouse click...
2) open another image using the filemanager, the image should open in the
same window
3) change image in the imageviewer using the arrow keys
4) using the scrol wheel to zoom (preferable centering arround the cursor
when zooming above the window size)

Nice to haves
5) it would be nice to also be able to crop and resize the image like gthumb
can.

ohh, the question is: can you suggest something that full fills the goals
above?