No thumbnails (e.g. in Thunar)

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psycho · Post by **psycho** » Sat Feb 16, 2013 3:35 am

There are no thumbnail previews for any file types (images, videos, pdfs...nothing). So far I've tried switching the icon previews setting off and on again in Thunar's preferences dialog; reinstalling tumbler, ffmpegthumbnailer, gdkpixbuf and thunar itself; trashing the .thumbnails directory; even manually adding files to the (currently empty) /usr/share/thumbnailers directory...nothing works. I've said "e.g. in Thunar" because I seem to remember that the GIMP also used to show image previews in its file open dialog, whereas now the icon for every image is identical, as in Thunar. What's going on?

psycho · Post by **psycho** » Tue Feb 19, 2013 9:49 am

*bump*

This is a deal-breaker for me: it's hopeless trying to work with image files without thumbnails. Is there really nothing else I could try, apart from changing DE's or distros?

spacelike · Post by **spacelike** » Tue Feb 19, 2013 5:44 pm

I had this exact same problem on 2 separate gentoo machines.
I remember trying everything too, and searching like crazy on google without a solution.

It can be fixed, I'm sorry to say however that I can't remember off the top of my head exactly what I did to solve it.

But here is everything that I can remember doing at the moment before it started working.
Make sure you compiled thunar with "exif" support. I don't have ffmpegthumbnailer or gdkpixbuf installed but thunar still generates thumbnails for me with only tumbler.

My use flags are the following:
thunar - dbus, exif, libnotify, pcre, startup-notification, udev, xfce_plugins_trash
tumbler - jpeg, pdf

Also I recall having to install imagemagick. You might want to give that a try.

I would also check to see that you are at least using the desktop profile with "eselect profile list" (on my laptop I think it didn't work until I went from the first profile to the desktop one) I also had to make sure that I had X added to my use flags.

psycho · Post by **psycho** » Tue Feb 19, 2013 8:00 pm

Thanks for those suggestions. EXIF isn't used (as far as I know) in e.g. png files, but it's one thing you're doing differently so I guess it's worth a try...particularly as the GIMP also uses libexif with exif in the global use flags, and that's the other app in which I noticed no image thumbnails. I'm rebuilding with exif and will see what happens.

psycho · Post by **psycho** » Wed Feb 20, 2013 10:19 pm

Nope, my Gentoo boxes just can't produce thumbnails. Very disappointing because as I said this is a deal-breaker for me, so I have to switch distros. I've really tried everything I can think of, including creating a new user to see if some obscure per-user setting was stopping them. Presumably the problem is with "tumbler", because older (pre-update) versions of my Gentoo systems displayed thumbnails with no problems...but I've rebuilt tumbler, even with gstreamer support to see if that was required, but nothing makes any difference. I'll keep Gentoo on one system and test it now and then to see if the problem is fixed by an update.

psycho · Post by **psycho** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 8:58 am

Does anyone know how thunar and tumbler are meant to interact to produce thumbnails? I noticed there was no tumblerd running in the background on my system, so added /usr/lib64/tumbler-1/tumblerd to my session. Made no difference...but I noticed that launching thunar killed tumbler. Just in case the console would tell me a bit more about what was going on, I launched tumblerd in a terminal window and launched thunar...and tumblerd immediately exited with "Segmentation fault". Maybe it's meant to be invoked by thunar and is spitting the dummy for that reason...or is this segfault the whole problem?

popsUlfr · Post by **popsUlfr** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 4:17 pm

Hello psycho!

It does not look good if tumbler segfaults. But tumbler is supposed to be spawned using dbus, did you check dbus is running correctly? I'm not using xfce but kde and just emerged thunar without tumbler. It picks up the default kde thumbnailer it seems since all my pictures have a thumbnail. You might have a look at "kde-base/thumbnailers" although it will have quite a bit of qt+kde dependencies so it defeats a bit the point of having xfce me thinks.
You reemerged thunar and tumbler? And does revdep-rebuild -i help?

psycho · Post by **psycho** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 10:17 pm

Thanks popsUlfr.

I started building kde-base/thumbnailers and the resulting messages about required use flags alerted me to the fact that I didn't have "dbus" as a global use flag in make.conf. I had of course checked earlier that dbus-daemon was running and that dbus was set for thunar: it was, but this must have been from the ebuild rather than make.conf. Anyway, whereas I can't see any packages the rebuilding of which could fix the thumbnailing in thunar, i *can* see that the GIMP is going to be rebuilt (via emerge -uDN world) with dbus support that it was previously lacking, so this may have fixed part of the problem, at least.

It's going to be a long, long world rebuild (libreoffice due to the dbus change, and firefox, thunderbird and chromium due to updated versions). When it's done I'll see if thunar's thumbnailing has been fixed. Thanks again.

rmzelnick · Post by **rmzelnick** » Mon Feb 25, 2013 6:20 am

http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/start

Under "Tumbler" section.

psycho · Post by **psycho** » Mon Feb 25, 2013 9:26 am

Rebuilding everything with the global dbus flag made not a scrap of difference. No thumbnails of any kind, anywhere.

Thanks rmzelnick, but I've already tried messing with the tumbler.rc settings: makes no difference. My Gentoo boxes just can't do thumbnails.

/me shrugs

popsUlfr · Post by **popsUlfr** » Mon Feb 25, 2013 4:28 pm

psycho wrote:Rebuilding everything with the global dbus flag made not a scrap of difference. No thumbnails of any kind, anywhere.

Thanks rmzelnick, but I've already tried messing with the tumbler.rc settings: makes no difference. My Gentoo boxes just can't do thumbnails.

/me shrugs

Very weird problem you got there. Did you check your system logs and your ~/.xsession-errors for anything related to dbus, tumbler, thunar... ?
On my other system I replaced xfce with LXDE a while back and pcmanfm is a very nice file browser (never had issues with it). Might be worth a shot as a hopefully temporary replacement for Thunar...

Johnny_Bit · Post by **Johnny_Bit** » Thu Feb 28, 2013 8:49 pm

I'll give You some info: the problem IS present on 64-bit systems. I've got 2 near identical laptops, one is 32-bit one 64 bit. Both have same use flags, same software, etc. Problem only appears on 64-bit one.

Problem is so annoying that I keep using 32-bit one because I can't stand not having thumbs and I don't want to make switch just because one thing fails...

spacelike · Post by **spacelike** » Fri Mar 01, 2013 12:56 am

Sorry if this sounds dumb, but have you tried making sure "show thumbnails" is checked in the thunar properties?

666threesixes666 · Post by **666threesixes666** » Fri Mar 01, 2013 1:42 am

you don't have to switch distributions, my nautilus (gnomes file browser) shows icons just fine for pictures and movies. you could try merging dolphin to test if kde's file browser will take out the deal breaker. or just emerge nautilus, and see if nautilus will do the trick for you. you might have to switch window managers (from xfce to gnome) but certainly dont need to ditch portage or gentoo kernels to get your ends.

SamuliSuominen · Post by **SamuliSuominen** » Fri Mar 01, 2013 8:40 am

Could be this bug http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457054
And the upstream bug http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9852

Supposedly downgrading tumbler, or upgrading gcc and recompiling tumbler "fixes things"

psycho · Post by **psycho** » Thu Mar 07, 2013 6:59 am

Thank you ssuominen!

Code: Select all

CFLAGS="-O0" emerge -1 tumbler

solved the problem. I'll leave it at that and hope the next version fixes the bug.

AmirKabir · Post by **AmirKabir** » Tue Nov 10, 2020 3:27 pm

since this was posted a while back, the bugs have been fixed.

you don't have to downgrade anything or change compile flags.

In order for thumbnails to show up, you have to have:

Code: Select all

media-video/ffmpegthumbnailer
xfce-extra/tumbler

installed.

Then you have to enable the USE flags for your desired file formats in order for their thumbnails to show up.

for example I wanted thumbnails for pdf,jpeg,png to show up so i added "jpeg png pdf" to the USE variable in make.conf.

This is what fixed it for me.

No thumbnails (e.g. in Thunar)

No thumbnails (e.g. in Thunar)

[SOLVED] No thumbnails (e.g. in Thunar)

thunar thumbnails