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Jamie Hutber
Asked: 2021-01-26 14:49:50 +0800 CST

Why do my thumbnails need to regenerate with every restart? Is it possible to allow them to persist?

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I have a large amount of images on my machine and every single time I reboot the machine, I lose this cache, or at least it feels this way.

The folder I frequent the most often has around 3.6k images, but many others have a slightly smaller but similar number.

Very very often I spent maybe 5mins just scrolling through to let all the thumbnails generate only to come back at a later date and the thumbnails have disapeared.

How can I retain the generated thumbsnails?

nautilus

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The way I know of looks like this:

    Install the dconf-editor app:

    sudo apt install dconf-editor

    Then open it, and either use its search feature to search for "thumbnail-cache", or for a similar effect, figure out the GUI and navigate to the org.gnome.desktop.thumbnail-cache location in it.

    You will be presented with two settings: maximum-size and maximum-age. Upon clicking them, dconf-editor will reveal their description. From this can be seen, that a value of -1 allows for no limits on the cache size and on the age of cached items.

    Otherwise, you can provide a value in megabytes for the maximum cache size (which is 512 by default), and a value in days for the maximum thumbnail age (which is 180 by default).

    If you would like to have a CLI solution, then executing the following in the terminal achieves the same:

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.thumbnail-cache maximum-size -1

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.thumbnail-cache maximum-age -1

    Take into consideration however that an unlimited thumbnail cache size may inflate the size of your /home/<YOURUSERNAME>/ directory — this might matter if you did not assign it to a separate, dedicated partition.

    Furthermore, you can keep an eye on the actual thumbnail files at this location:

    /home/<YOURUSERNAME>/.cache/thumbnails/
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