A Standard for Thumbnailers

[Alexander Larsson]

On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 14:11 +0000, Erlend Davidson wrote:
> I have been writing small thumbnailers for the filemanager Thunar 
> (http://thunar.xfce.org/index.html).  I like the way Thunar uses a 
> .desktop file to invoke external programs and scripts (like 'convert' 
> from imagemagick) to generate the thumbnails for various formats.  How 
> this works is detailed at: 
> http://thunar.xfce.org/documentation/C/customizing-thunar.html#thumbnailers.
> 
> A lot of programs generate thumbnails these days, and there exists a 
> clear standard as to where these thumbnails should be placed so that 
> different applications can share thumbnails.  However there is no such 
> standard for thumbnailers: different applications each come with there 
> own host of small thumbnailer applications.
> 
> The thumbnailers for Thunar register themselves with Thunar by 
> installing a .desktop file under /usr/local/share/thumbnailers.  This 
> contains a special key like:
> 
>  X-Thumbnailer-Exec=/usr/local/bin/eps-thumbnailer %i %o %s
> 
> where %i is the input file, %o the output file, and %s the size of the 
> output.  This is explained in more detail in the link above.
> 
> This seems to me to be a very good system - I am wondering if it, or 
> something similar, could be used as a standard to allow applications to 
> share thumbnailers?

That is very similar to the nautilus system. Except it stores the
commandline (supporting %i, %o, %s and also %u for source uri) in gconf
key per mimetype, also including a per-mimetype enable/disable toggle. 

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a maverick umbrella-wielding househusband on a mission from God. She's a 
brilliant tomboy museum curator with an MBA from Harvard. They fight crime!