It would be nice if you could zoom images out, so you could view them small. That's very useful when trying to figure out the visibility of image elements when the image is made smaller, for example in a webpage or as an icon.
You might be able to simply use the thumbnail view for this, where there is a zoom slider and you can make the thumbnails as small as you want.
Yes, but it's simpler to use the image viewer for that. The zooming would only apply to the current image, not all in the folder. And simply put it feels more natural that way, been able to zoom the image the way you want.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 431402 ***