[Thunar-dev] A Standard for Thumbnailers

[Benedikt Meurer]

Stanislav Brabec wrote:
>>>> BTW: I fail to see the problem here. How often do people regenerate
>>>> thumbnails that +1 or 2 seconds for 40 JPEGs makes a difference?
>>> It's important because it gives an impression of slowness and
>>> unresponsiveness. And you rarely generate them, but you import pictures
>>> from digital cameras rather often.
>> Here the I/O is definitely the limiting factor from my experience.
>> Accessing data on digital cameras is very slow with the models I've tested.
> 
> No, for digital cameras the limiting factor is the stupidity of the
> thumbnailer.
> 
> Small jpeg-EXIF-embedded thumbnail is most often stored in first few
> blocks of the image. You can create thumbnail much faster than you can
> load the image.
> 
> Mid-size jpeg thumbnail (typically 640x480) is typically stored in last
> few blocks of the image and you need only few additional seeks to find
> exact start point. You can again create thumbnail faster than to load
> image.
> 
> You can try to compare my dcraw-thumbnailer with Nautilus jpeg
> thumbnailer to see the difference:
> http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/gnome-dcraw
> Note that this page also contain "classical" thumbnailer, which reads
> the whole file and scales it down by its own.

Can we perhaps use this trick for the dcraw thumbnailer? Jens/Erlend?

Benedikt