6

Nautilus properties offer the choices Never, Local files only and Always for generating previews for files.

How does it decide what is a local file, and what is not?

What I'm trying to do is get more detailed control over what folders get thumbnails/previews generated. Is there some config file I can change to get more detailed control over this?

1 Answer 1

4
+50

Local files are the files actually on your discs.

Nautilus can also show files from filesystems available through the GVFS system. This includes (but is probably not limited to):

Those are all not local files since the files them self reside on someone else's system.

Changing if preview should be shown for specific files is done on an extension or mine type based method through the command gsettings.

disable all thumbnails

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.thumbnailers disable-all true

Disable PDFs

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.thumbnailers disable "['application/pdf']"

(in early versions of Ubuntu when gsettings was introduced Nautilus did not abide these though). The manual method of turning thumbnails off would then be rm -r ~/.thumbnails && ln -s /dev/null .thumbnails

Just in case you are interested (but side stepping the answer): there is someone that made Gloobus Preview and it seems to have a bit more options.

Gloobus preview is an quick file previewer which supports many formats and preview them instantly. Currently it works better with nautilus and also with marlin file browser but many people don't use other file manager except nautilus.

It uses (/can use) gnome-sushi for thumbnails and this seems to generate them quicker than the how Nautilus does. Gnome-sushi seems to be installable seperate too (see the link).

(I did not test either of these programs though)

3
  • Do I understand correctly that you mean local is any path beginning with / but something like smb://server/path is not local? Jan 17, 2013 at 15:30
  • Yes @SindriTraustason as I understood it external usb discs (those are mounted in /media or /mnt) are considered local too.
    – Rinzwind
    Jan 17, 2013 at 15:32
  • 3
    Nautilus is not good at knowing that remote filesystems mounted through /etc/fstab or fuse are not local. TO get this to work all remote access needs to go through GVFS.
    – Sylwester
    Jan 17, 2013 at 17:21

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .