'Show thumbnails' preference on per-view basis

[nick-s-b]

Currently, Nemo has an option to either show or disable thumbnail previews. Thumbnails make sense when you're in "Icon View" but they make much less sense in List View. Allowing the user to use thumbnail previews in Icon View and disable them in List View means that if you're browsing some huge volume, you can just browse them very quickly in List View without wasting CPU/battery on previews and then easily switch to Icon View if you want to see thumbnails.

[Hangarter35]

I do agree with this !

[JacquesRemy]

I've the same request. It'll be also more clear and easy to look for a file.
Thanks

[JacquesRemy]

waiting for an improvement, I add a nemo.action which open gthumb window for the current directory and I let preview on off. However the best way should be your proposal.

[smurphos]

@icarter09 - this can be closed - feature was implemented with - #2094

[simonwiles]

#2094 ("This adds settings to inherit the view type and thumbnailing setting from a parent.") seems to be unrelated to this feature request?

[smurphos]

You can toggle thumbnail visibility for any particular folder with an (optional) button on the nemo menu bar. You can also set whether this button's settings persists for sub-directories of a parent. Whilst it's not specifically what the feature request asked for it allows you to achieve the same outcome.

[simonwiles]

That's a different feature -- this issue is for using thumbnails for Icon View, and disabling them for List VIew (i.e. irrespective of the parent settings).

[schaetzc]

@simonwiles As you already guessed, inherit view type is not related to OP's request. »On per-view basis« talks about the view modes Icon View, List View, Compact View controlled by these buttons:

Each view mode should have its own setting for showing thumbnails.

@smurphos This could be used as a workaround if OP was willing to do an additional click each time the view mode is switched. However, the toolbar button Show Thumbnails stopped working for me. I have no idea when exactly it stopped working. Currently I'm on nemo version 4.6.1.

OP's feature request is also described by another person on StackExchange:
Display Thumbnails In Icon View But Not In Compact View

From there, I would like to propose a different solution for OP's problem. To OP, »thumbnails make sense when you're in "Icon View" but they make much less sense in List View«. However, I don't think this is actually because of the view mode, but because of the thumbnail size. By default, icon view has much larger icons than list view. If you increased the size (using the slider at the bottom right), then even in list mode thumbnails would be useful.

Therefore an alternative solution could be a setting Display thumbnails if icon is bigger than ___ px. However, I'm unsure how well this works with HiDpi settings, especially when working in a multi-monitor setup where some monitors are HiDpi and some are not.

[SomeTroglodyte]

I concur - a very simple 'disable all thumnailing in all list views' would be tremendously helpful even if not necessarily the optimal solution.

[simonwiles]

@SomeTroglodyte honestly, imo, it's pretty much the optimal solution. It's simple, clean, clear, straightforward to implement (from a logical perspective, at least), and sidesteps the quagmire of thresholds for size in different rendering contexts (should this be configurable? arrgghh...) etc. If I want thumbnails (typically only ever for browsing folders full of images) I'll use "Icon View" (clue's kinda in the name), and probably increase the size considerably, no problem. I don't really want to incur the overhead of rendering and caching thumbnails for potentially thousands and thousands of images, videos, pdfs etc., especially on removable media, unless I specifically request it -- and especially not when they're too small to be useful anyway!

[tekstryder]

The title of the duped bug: nemo disable thumbnails in compact-view and list-view #1561 is succinct. I'm surprised this isn't the default, or at the very least optional, particularly given the slower performance of nemo relative to thunar.

[GitHorst]

@mtwebster any update on this?

some additional thoughts: apart from 'having such an option would generally make sense', it would also be "needed" for fancy icon sets. at the moment, if "show thumbnails" is enabled, you see "nice" icons for folders and for non-previewable files and in-between you see ugly rectangles for previewable files. on the other hand, if you disable "show thumbnails" then you do not even see thumbnail previews in the icon view :(

[MarkJeronimus]

I hope this "simple, clean, clear, straightforward" feature is going to be implemented soon. The only workaround that existed, and stopped working in 4.6.1, doesn't even exist anymore in 5.2.4.

[rh-github-2015]

This wouldn't be so much of a problem it the thumbnailing process(es) wouldn't bog nemo down so much. As in - we now have a filer that needs a restart every few hours and causes severe head thrashing on antique spindle-based media.

Good thumbnailing would be a separate, low-prio, supervised process¹ with provisions to simulate what back in the day Novell invented as 'elevator seeking' - at least an option to force a single thread. Additionally, adding/configuring/disabling thumbnailer plugins for specific mime types/extensions² would be straighforward, accessible via GUI and consistent - instead of bash-only, convoluted and changing all the time...

Footnotes

1. (as in, after a max of ~500ms a watchdog automatically kills amok runners and the file is remembered as un-thumbnailable) ↩

2. (yes! mime type detection is at the moment far too dumb) ↩

[Jeremy7701]

@rh-github-2015 - this is ridiculous!

elevator seeking

A disk access technique that processes multiple requests in a priority based upon which ones are closest to the current position of the read/write head.
(The position of the read/write head is unknown and doesn't matter since you are writing to a cache).

AFAIK Thumbnailing runs single threaded in a separate thread.

Also adding/configuring/disabling of thumbnails for groups of mime types occurs "automagically" when you install appropriate packages. If you want to tweak a text file, then use a text editor.