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The file manager that came with my installation ("Simple file manager for Gnome") doesn't show thumbnails for jpg, png, and videos. I've gone to /Preferences/Search & Preview and made sure it's set to always show thumbnails but it doesn't. How can I fix this?

Mehdi Charife
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Axel Lieber
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4 Answers4

19

Install FFMPEG Thumbnailer

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer

Then close and reopen file manager. Thumbnails for most video files should generate now.

Otherwise, delete ~/.cache/thumbnails and restart your computer

Lorenz Keel
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Algo7
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7

I think there's a bug either in totem-video-thumbnailer or GStreamer.

When you search for solutions, many of them suggest ffmpegthumbnailer.

I can't say whether it's a better, or a worse thumbnailer, but installing it did work for me.

The only caveat is that you seem to have to configure things to override the system default. I couldn't find what the default processing order is for conflicting thumbnailers in the same directory, but thumbnailers in ~/.local/share/thumbnailers appear to take precedence over /usr/share/thumbnailers

Creating a link solved my problem:

ln -s /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer

A couple of notes:

  1. Here is an excellent answer with a swag of background about how thumbnailing hangs together

  2. You may quit nautilus/nemo by running them with the -q flag

    $nautilus -q
$nemo -q

  3. Deleting the contents of ~/.cache/thumbnails causes thumbnails to be rebuilt the next time they are needed

Aaron
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  • Similar to this answer, I removed the conflicting totem ffmpeg thumbnailer rm /usr/share/thumbnailers/totem.thumbnailer I then had to reinstall ffmpegthumbnailer since it was already installed sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer --reinstall. Thanks for your help :) – Baa Oct 09 '22 at 16:38
  • The trouble with modifying stuff in /usr/share is that you don't own it. Your changes can be overwritten by the system at any time. That is why I suggested that simply linking the ffmpeg thumbnailer in your local thumbnailers directory will have it found first and so be used instead of the totem one. No need to remove anything from /usr/share – Aaron Oct 09 '22 at 21:33
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    yeah I tried that first but it didn't resolve it for some reason, it wasn't until I removed the totem file that thumbnails started to work, but I'm not sure why... yours is definitely a better solution. – Baa Oct 09 '22 at 21:36
  • Thank you Aaron. I have been struggling for a week now and this is the solution! I also just deleted Totem thumbs as I didn't have a thumbnailers dir in .local/share – i9pp0 Jun 18 '23 at 13:32
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    @i9pp0 Just creating ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/ should have been sufficient I reckon. – Aaron Jun 19 '23 at 21:48
4

As I haven't been able to fix the issue, I installed Nemo as an alternative file manager and lo and behold, thumbnails are back on the menu! Nemo is a more elaborate and hence to me more useful file manager anyway. Note that in the software center it appears only as "Files" which is... err... unhelpful. In the description, the word "Nemo" is mentioned though so it's not that hard to find.

Axel Lieber
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2

The same as Aaron's answer except the link step. Only linking the thumbnailer to nautilus' config solved my problem.

Ubuntu 24.04

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer
mkdir -p ~/.config/nautilus/thumbnailers
ln -sf /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer ~/.config/nautilus/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer
nautilus -q
Omar AbdelWahab
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  • I get this msg when I try to create the link: ln: failed to create symbolic link '/home/$USER/.config/nautilus/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer': File exists – Bryan Jan 18 '25 at 08:56
  • @Bryan You can use this command instead:

    ln -sf /usr/share/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer ~/.config/nautilus/thumbnailers/ffmpegthumbnailer.thumbnailer

    #the -f flag forces overwriting the existing symbolic link with our new link.

    #I've edited the answer to handle this case.

     – Omar AbdelWahab Jan 19 '25 at 11:49