The Eye of Gnome program is the GNOME image viewing and cataloging program. It uses the canvas for its main image display, and it defines a custom canvas item that can do extremely fast scaling of images suitable for an image viewer.
EOG also defines a model/view/controller abstraction for ``wrapped lists'', and in turn implements an icon or thumbnail view for large sets of images. It uses special techniques so that only the icons and captions that fit in the canvas window actually exist as canvas items; these are created and destroyed on the fly as the icon list is scrolled and updated.
The canvas allows for easy event handling, and with the delayed update model, also allows for on-the-fly loading and generation of thumbnails.