[Thunar-dev] Thumblerd and large files collections

[Grigory Tuboltsev]

Hi,

Thank you all devs for developing Thunar. It is small, lightweight and 
easy to use.

I've got some problems with Thunar trying to work with very large photo 
or PDF collections though.

I've got problems starting with 30 PDF files in a directory, not to 
speak about Really Large Collections: 3000 pdf files, 2000 raw photos, 
5000 (15Mbite large) jpegs and so on. Sometimes I even have to work with 
photo or PDF collections consisting of 30 000 + files.

I have "show thumbnails" setting switched on by default for everyday 
use. Every time i try to browse a directory full of photo or PDFs or 
video files Thunar (thumblerd) starts thumbnailing them. It takes about 
60-90 of CPU time and probably the same amount of disk I/O capacity so 
So my PC gets unresponsive, slow etc.

So, i see following problems:

1) There is NO way to quickly switch thumbnailing off and on again. No 
button on the toolbar, no hotkey, NOTHING. I need to open settings 
window every time, than click on checkbox, than OK. FOUR clicks just to 
switch thumbnailing off or on.

2) Even if i make all this clicks (after navigating to a directory with 
a large file collection) thumblerd does not stop working. It just 
continues to use 90% of CPU time. So I need to kill thumblerd manually 
every time i make this navigation error.

3) Thumblerd does not have limits (or GUI-way to change them) like "Does 
not start thumbnailing in folders with over 150 objects" or "does not 
make thumbnails for files over 3Mb large" and so on.

4) (more a FR than a problem) There is no way to tell thumblerd make 
thumbnails just for selected files. This would be a killer feature :)

Working with 3000 or 5000 jpeg files is a usual everyday usecase for all 
us photographers or photo editors. Thousands of PDF files are often used 
by ebook-readers users and so on. So Thunar (or thumblerd) should be 
ready for such usecases.

Thanks for reading and sorry for my broken English :)

With best regards,
Grigory Tuboltsev