How can I instruct Nautilus to pre-generate thumbnails?

Nautilus's thumbnailing routines actually come from the libgnome-desktop library, so it is possible to run the same thumbnailers outside of the file manager.

The API is a little complex, but the following Python script should help:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys

from gi.repository import Gio, GnomeDesktop

def make_thumbnail(factory, filename):
    mtime = os.path.getmtime(filename)
    # Use Gio to determine the URI and mime type
    f = Gio.file_new_for_path(filename)
    uri = f.get_uri()
    info = f.query_info(
        'standard::content-type', Gio.FileQueryInfoFlags.NONE, None)
    mime_type = info.get_content_type()

    if factory.lookup(uri, mtime) is not None:
        print "FRESH       %s" % uri
        return False

    if not factory.can_thumbnail(uri, mime_type, mtime):
        print "UNSUPPORTED %s" % uri
        return False

    thumbnail = factory.generate_thumbnail(uri, mime_type)
    if thumbnail is None:
        print "ERROR       %s" % uri
        return False

    print "OK          %s" % uri
    factory.save_thumbnail(thumbnail, uri, mtime)
    return True

def thumbnail_folder(factory, folder):
    for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(folder):
        for filename in filenames:
            make_thumbnail(factory, os.path.join(dirpath, filename))

def main(argv):
    factory = GnomeDesktop.DesktopThumbnailFactory()
    for filename in argv[1:]:
        if os.path.isdir(filename):
            thumbnail_folder(factory, filename)
        else:
            make_thumbnail(factory, filename)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main(sys.argv))

Save this to a file and mark it executable. You may also need to install the gir1.2-gnomedesktop-3.0 package if it is not already installed.

After that, simply invoke the script with the files or folders you want to thumbnail as arguments. Thumbnails will be saved to ~/.thumbnails where applications like Nautilus expect to find them.

The script below should do the job. It uses evince-thumbnailer which - as far as I know - comes with every gnome installation and is the default thumbnailer.
Save as pdfthumbnailer.sh and make it executable.
Usage: pdfthumbnailer.sh dir1 [dir2, ...]

#!/bin/bash

F1=$HOME/.thumbnails/normal
F2=$HOME/.cache/thumbnails/normal
SAVE_FOLDER=$F1
[ -e $F2 ] && SAVE_FOLDER=$F2

# the thumbnailing function
evincethumb() {
    outname=$(echo -n "$(readlink -f "$0")" | \
    perl -MURI::file -MDigest::MD5=md5_hex -ne 'print md5_hex(URI::file->new($_));')
    # no work if thumbnail already present
    [ ! -e $SAVE_FOLDER/${outname}.png ] && {
        echo "$0"
        #uncomment only one of both thumbnailers
        #convert -thumbnail 128x128 "$0"[0] $SAVE_FOLDER/${outname}.png 2>/dev/null
        evince-thumbnailer -s 128 "$0" $SAVE_FOLDER/${outname}.png 2>/dev/null
    }
}

# make our function visible to the subshell in "find -exec" below
export -f evincethumb

# loop through all given folders
for folder in "$@" ; do
    find "$folder" -type f -exec bash -c evincethumb {} \;
done

Restriction:

• does not add Thumb::URI and Thumb::MTime attributes to the thumbnails as pointed out by James Henstridge. So far I have seen no evidence that the default evince-thumbnailer is doing so. In other words..as long as nautilus does not regenerate the thumbnails the script can be used for the job.

Notes:

• prints the name of the file when generating a new thumbnail, skips generation if existing
• speed: 37 pdf files tested with both evince-thumbnailer and convert (from imagemagick): 3seconds for evince-thumbnailer and 14seconds for convert.
• generates thumbnails recognized by nautilus
• path names handled by the perl URL:file module (spaces and other characters are correctly translated into a file uri)
• needs perl, present in a default installation
• files unhandled by evince-thumbnailer will simply output an error - muted with 2>/dev/null
• look at the MimeType line in /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer to see a list of handled file types
• updates: starting from 12.04 the thumbnail folder seems to be ~/.cache/thumbnails.
  More robust paths using readlink.

Inspiration:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=683394

Got distracted for a while and rosch beat me to it :) Didn't know evince-thumbnailer existed (I'm not a Gnome user) but anyway, since I've already written it, here it goes. It requires imagemagick installed, check and install if not there with:

which convert || sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Save as mkthumb.sh (for instance), chmod +x mkthumb.sh it and execute it with absolute paths as arguments (you can use -s as its first paramterer to skip generating thumbnails that already exist) i.e.:

user@host $ ./mkthumb.sh -s /home/user/Downloads /home/user/blah
Processing directory /home/user/Downloads/pics/
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pics/FeO08.jpg
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pics/UrOCu.jpg
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pics/34ATZ.gif
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pics/WBRE3.jpg
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pics/LjLdH.jpg
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pics/xvvae (1).jpg
SKIP /home/user/Downloads/pics/itcrowd.jpg
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pics/76180344.jpg
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pics/fgk5N.jpg
....

The script (I've modified it slightly to support most images, you can add more extensions if you need them):

#!/bin/bash

# USAGE: mkthumb.sh [-s] <abs_path> [abs_path]
# create nautilus thumbnails for images and PDFs in the directories (and their
# sub-directories) given as parameters.
# -s is used to skip generating thumbnails that already exist

skip_existing=0
if [[ "${1}" == "-s" ]]; then
  skip_existing=1
  shift
fi

mkthumb() {
  file="${1}"
  dest="${2}"
  convert -thumbnail 128x128 "${file}[0]" "${dest}" &>/dev/null
  if (( $? == 0 )); then
    echo "OK   ${file}"
  else
    echo "FAIL ${file}"
  fi
}

OLDIFS="${IFS}"
IFS=$'\n'
for dir in $@; do
  realdir=`realpath "${dir}"`
  echo "Processing directory ${realdir}"
  for file in $(find "${realdir}" -regextype posix-egrep -iregex \
  '.*\.(pdf|png|jpg|gif|jpeg)'); do
    md5=$(echo -n "${file}" | perl -MURI::file -MDigest::MD5=md5_hex -ne \
          'print md5_hex(URI::file->new($_));')
    dest="${HOME}/.thumbnails/normal/${md5}.png"
    if [[ -f "${dest}" ]]; then
      if [[ "${skip_existing}" == "0" ]]; then
        mkthumb "${file}" "${dest}"
      else
        echo "SKIP ${file}"
      fi
    else
      mkthumb "${file}" "${dest}"
    fi
  done
done
IFS="${OLDIFS}"

It handles files with spaces in their names without issues.

A bit of testing here:

user@host $ find .thumbnails/
.thumbnails/
.thumbnails/fail
.thumbnails/fail/gnome-thumbnail-factory
.thumbnails/normal

# ok - no thumbnails present.

user@host $ ./mkthumb.sh -s /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/
Processing directory /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/800pdf.pdf
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/3_TO_pricelist.pdf
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/111011-speisekarte-mit-desserts.pdf
OK   /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/1186157_r4f3a355eb104a (1).pdf

user@host $ touch tstamp

user@host $ ./mkthumb.sh -s /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/
Processing directory /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/
SKIP /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/800pdf.pdf
SKIP /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/3_TO_pricelist.pdf
SKIP /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/111011-speisekarte-mit-desserts.pdf
SKIP /home/user/Downloads/pdf/test/1186157_r4f3a355eb104a (1).pdf

# running nautilus once now to see if it generates new thumbnails

# checking for new thumbnails:

user@host $ find .thumbnails/ -newer tstamp

# None.

I wrote a package that modified James' script to include multiprocessing and the option to recursively generate thumbnails. The package is pip-installable. Check here for installation instructions.

An example of usage is:

thumbgen -w 4 -r -d your_directory

• -r: recursively generate thumbnails

• -w: number of cores to use

The thumbnail specification includes shared thumbnail repositories , which allow for pre-generating thumbnails to be distributed along with the associated files rather than have every user generate their own thumbnail. So in theory you could generate thumbnails and then add them to a shared repository thus removing the need to generate them in future if you cleared out your thumbnails directory, or moved them all to a different machine or whatever.

http://specifications.freedesktop.org/thumbnail-spec/thumbnail-spec-latest.html#DIRECTORY

This Ask Ubuntu page come up in the results of a search when I was trying to find out if any application supports shared thumbnail repositories. Sadly it appears that no application supports them.