Ubuntu – How do Nautilus album art thumbnails work

12.04iconsmusicnautilusogg-vorbis

There's something for which I've been searching an answer for a while now, but to no avail, and it's strange to me, as it seems like a thing that people would talk about: one of those nice little nonsense that enhance the computing experience a little bit.

Anyway. I have a fair music collection. I save all the songs as ogg files. All is fine, and I can listen to the files, but there's something weird with the files in Nautilus: some have icons displaying their album art, while others don't, and I just can't understand WHY.

I read on this site today that it's a matter of embedding the album art to the file, but that's not true, as I embedded the album art to the files I wanted several times, to no avail. Furthermore, removing an embedded album art from a file didn't have any effect on those that ARE displaying the icons.

So my question is: How does it work? Where does Nautilus (or Ubuntu, I don't know) get the picture from? How do I edit it?

Best Answer

I believe it does in fact use the tags embedded in the file, which are usually called id3 tags, at least for MP3. I think ogg files read id3 tags, but may not read id3v2 tags (version 2). Some software writes one or the other, or sometimes both.

I've noticed that it takes a while for Nautilus to display the album art once the folder is first opened, but then it remembers them. I'm pretty sure it stores the images in ~/.thumbhnails/normal, but this directory can be very big, and opening it is a chore.

I've heard of a program called "cover thumbnailer" that makes nautilus work better; I haven't really tried it out myself, though.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Nautilus Thumbnails Size Fix

I have found a very simple solution to this problem.

After a single change, the above folder now looks like this when set to 200% icon zoom level:

200% fixed

It was as simple as changing the "thumbnail-size" value in "dconf-editor" for nautilus to a larger value.

To apply the change, make sure "dconf-editor" is installed in your system by typing the following into a terminal:

sudo apt-get install dconf-editor

After installing, type Alt - F2 to pull up the command dialogue, and type "dconf-editor" to search for it and click on it.

Once you have "dconf-editor" open, navigate to the following location in the left pane:

org > gnome > nautilus > icon-view

See this example image for the location:

dconf-editor

The value that needs changed is the "thumbnail-size" value. I changed it from a default of 64 to 128. Depending on your display resolution, you may need to change it to a different value to make things look exactly the way you want. Smaller displays might need a value larger than 64, but 128 might be to large, so try something like 96.

Once that value is changed, exit "dconf-editor". Now the thumbnail cache needs to be cleared to allow that changes to take effect.

First close all Nautilus windows, then type the following code in a terminal (each line is a separate command).

nautilus -q
sudo rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails/

The first command makes sure Nautilus is closed, and the second clears your thumbnail cache.

Note that this does not affect file or folder icons. Those will still appear to be smaller than the picture and video icons generated by Nautilus (or more correctly generated by ffmpegthumbnailer). This is still a huge improvement for thumbnails in Nautilus even with this shortcoming.

This fix worked on Ubuntu 14.04.1.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Nautilus Thumbnails Size Fix

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