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Accepted
Xayden Rosario
Asked: 2018-06-06 15:42:23 +0800 CST

Fix thunar doesn't show image/video thumbnails in xubuntu 18.04

  • 772

No matter what I do the result is there no image/video thumbnails

$ thunar --version
Thunar 1.6.15 (Xfce 4.12)

$ sudo apt install tumbler tumbler-plugins-extra ffmpegthumbnailer 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
ffmpegthumbnailer is already the newest version (2.1.1-0.1build1).
tumbler is already the newest version (0.2.1-0ubuntu1).
tumbler-plugins-extra is already the newest version (0.2.1-0ubuntu1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.

$ mv ~/.config/Thunar ~/.config/Thunar.bak

also enabled thumbnails in thunar:

PREVIEW

xfce xubuntu thunar thumbnails

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Every post out there that tries to fix the problem of thumbnails they do the following or something similar

    $ killall thunar
$ sudo apt install tumbler tumbler-plugins-extra ffmpegthumbnailer 
$ thunar -q

    and that's it, they open thunar, and thumbnails magically appear, but You need to restart your machine.

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  2. I appreciate how everyone tries to help, but often times in the Linux community we make things unnecessarily complicated. Usually the problem for no thumbnail previews is in the preferences. Linux is often designed to be fast and efficient. In order to do this it is sometimes not as user friendly. For example I am using right now I am using Xubuntu. That is Ubuntu with Xcfe desktop manager. My system is very fast, but when I hook up my android phone like you I preview my thumbnails until I transfer the picture onto my computer. However when I open thunar (thunar is the Xcfe file manager so all you have to do to open it is open any folder -for example your home folder.) go to edit and click on preferences under the display tab were it says Show thumbnails: it is set to "show local files only". If I change that to "Always" I can preview the thumbnails on my android phone. Problem fixed. The tradeoff is that it slows down how fast the folder opens, because now it has to transfer and display all of the pictures from the phone through the phones connection over the USB transfer wire and through your USB port for every single picture on your phone. There should be something similar for every version of Linux. The only problem is finding it. Every desktop envirionmet will be different and they often change things from distro to distro.

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