Ubuntu – Refresh thumbnails in nautilus

nautilus

How does one refresh thumbnails in nautilus? In my videos folder I have some MKVs and only half of them have the movie border and a excerpt from the movie and the others (also MKVs encoded in the same way) just have the ordinary film icon.

(F5 doesnt do it.)

Best Answer

Updated for 14.04 LTS (or later)

From 12.10 onward, thumbnails are stored at ~/.cache/thumbnails

Corrected commands:

rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails

Then either restart, or:

killall nautilus

Original answer: (for 12.04, and earlier)

Here the commands:

rm -r  ~/.thumbnails
killall nautilus

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Why is Nautilus listing so slow when showing thumbnails

Perhaps you can try turning off thumbnail rendering as a workaround: in Nautilus go to Edit>Preferences>Preview, and try turning a few of those options off.

I asked a similar question in the Inkscape user forum, and got this answer:

AFAIK the library used by Nautilus to render the preview thumbnails for SVG files (librsvg) supports fewer SVG features than Inkscape, and chokes on certain filter effects and linked images (IIRC of type 'jpeg' or 'tiff'), and possibly other items too. See also: Bug #305546 in librsvg (Ubuntu): “Nautilus crashing/freezing when opening folder with svg file”. Nothing Inkscape can do about that-> needs to be addressed in Nautilus (don't freeze) and librsvg (handle failures to render certain SVG files more graciously).

The bug report is here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/librsvg/+bug/305546. Does that sound familiar?

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.