Re: no preview thumbnails for various file types in 2.5.x

[Jens Finke <jens triq net>]

Jens Ansorg wrote:
> At some point in the 2.5.x series (using 2.5.90 now) Nautilus lost the
> ability to show thumbnails with actual file content for various file
> types, i.e. SVG files, XCF Gimp files.
>
> See this screenshot: http://www.ja-web.de/tmp/missing-thumbnail.jpg
>
> there are thumbnails of the mentioned type that show a preview - these
> are created weeks/months ago. There are others that show just the icon -
> created or edited or moved from folder to another one (files that hat a
> preview loose it when I move them around)

The thumbnail is bound to the location of the file. If you move it, the 
preview gets indeed lost. For 'normal' image files, this isn't a problem 
because PNG, JPEG and TIFF can be previewed by nautilus itself (*). XCF 
files are a separate issue, since these previews can only created by the 
Gimp. If you move an image the preview is lost and can only be created 
by the Gimp again (**).

> Probably related issue (not on this screenshot): 
> I have a ftp-mount to my web server - works great btw :) 
> I have set up nautilus to show thumbnails for all files.
> I open a folder on the ftp server that has several small image files
> (png, jpg) Some of them get shown as thumbnail but most do not. 

As someone already mentioned, nautilus shows only thumbnails for local 
files by default. There are also other rules applying here, eg. show 
file content directly if file is smaller than x kb or don't show any 
thumbnail if file is larger than x MB.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

  Jens


*: To be more precise: Nautilus can thumbnail every file, which can be 
loaded through gdk-pixbuf library or files which have external 
thumbnailers installed (eg. there are some for PS/PDF).

**: No, it doesn't make sense to write a nautilus thumbnailer for XCF, 
since this will always result in starting Gimp, which is damn slow for 
thumbnailing.