Thumbnails and Previews Missing for Some Image Files in Nautilus File Picker

General Help
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Hello Zorin community,

I've been facing an issue with the Nautilus file browser (or file picker) on Zorin OS where thumbnails and previews aren't being generated consistently for all image files. Here's a quick overview of the situation:

The Problem:

When opening a file picker or browsing images through Nautilus:

  • Some images have tiny thumbnails next to their filenames.
  • The preview pane on the right opens for some images, showing a detailed preview.
  • However, other images (from various sources, such as professional cameras, mobile cameras, or exported from tools like Inkscape or PowerPoint) do not display thumbnails or previews.

What I've Tried So Far:

  1. I made sure that "Show Thumbnails" in Nautilus preferences is set to "All sources".
  2. I installed thumbnail-related packages like ffmpegthumbnailer, tumbler, and gnome-sushi to ensure all file types are supported. (gnome-sushi is already the newest version (42.0-0ubuntu1))
  3. Cleared the thumbnail cache using:
    rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails/*

Despite all this, some images still do not display thumbnails or previews.

image
image1121×463 109 KB

System Information:

  • OS: Zorin OS 17.1 Education
  • Nautilus Version: Files 42.6
  • Image Sources: Professional camera JPEGs, mobile camera JPEGs, exported images from Inkscape and PowerPoint

My Question:

Has anyone else encountered similar issues? Are there any specific settings, packages, or workflows that I might be missing to ensure consistent thumbnail and preview generation across all images? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

2 Likes
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It's a very known problem, it haven't been fixed even in the latest Gnome.

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The thumbnails are generated on the fly as you open the image or something else triggers this process. Unfortunately the file picker on its own doesn't trigger the thumbnail generation.

Manually, you can click on the file so that it generates the preview on the right side; the next time you open the file picker that image would load the thumbnail normally.

Or you can run a script to do this for you, either at given intervals or on demand. There are already a few that I found online:

There's also a file size limit to avoid generating previews for files that are too large. You can follow these steps to change it:

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We should inform Portal developers about this, but at the same time it's hard to think that they don't know about such an issue that can be seen since the first use of Portal.

1 Like