[Thunar-dev] Problem with thumbnails

[Erik Harrison]

On Feb 17, 2008 6:37 AM, Erlend Davidson <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > Hehe, high-performance and large images? It is possible to load and
> > store thumbnails inside the EXIF data AFAIK. I imagine large JPEGs
> > will sometimes have that. The thumbnailer could check for that and
> > fail otherwise.
> >
> Most images produced by a digital camera will have a thumbnail stored in
> the exiv data (it's the same thumbnail the camera uses to display the
> image on the LCD).  Thunar already extracts those (this came in 0.8.0,
> and gives very good performance).
>
> > Or, the thumbnailer should gracefully fail when overwhelmed, and let
> > Thunar use the generic icon for that mime type.
> Well the problem is how to tell when you're overwhelmed?  Difference
> people have difference ideas of when a thumbnailer should and shouldn't
> run... I think most people would say don't run if it's going to use swap
> space, I would say don't run if it's going to adversely affect the
> apparent responsiveness of the operating environment.  If you're running
> a remote filesystem (fusesmb / sshfs) then the file-sizes which are safe
> to thumbnail change dramatically.
>

Which is why I wasn't arguing for a constant file size. I figured a
simple timeout would scale nicely.

What's Nautilus's solution here? We use Nautilus thumbnailers if GConf
is available, we ought to look and see how they handle this problem -
do the individual thumbnailers take care of it, or does Nautilus kill
thumbnailers that misbehave?

> One or two of the Thunar-thumbnailers (the goodies.xfce.org ones) will
> refuse to run on large files.  For example the xmgrace thumbnailer (.agr
> files) won't run on files > 50MB, because it would actually have to load
> all of that into memory.  But as I said before you cannot apply the same
> logic to video files (they aren't loaded into memory).
>
> Having thumbnailers try and run on large files just to fail is bad...
> for the 3 seconds when it's loading the performance of the user's
> computer will be affected.
>
>
> Erlend
>
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-- 
Erik
"Look at me still talking when there is Science to do"