A Standard for Thumbnailers

[Stanislav Brabec]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:

> > For typical small and simple thumbnailer it saves only few milliseconds
> > per image, for thumbnailers preloading larger libraries it may be more.
> 
> There are very good reasons to avoid this. You don't want to load
> arbitrary code into the file manager (or any other process) just to
> create a thumbnail. See Alex' for good reasons to avoid this.
> 
> From the performance POV, we're talking about milliseconds, because it
> doesn't really matter whether ld loads the shared libraries into our
> process or into a new process. It's basicly the fork overhead, plus some
> additional setting up (but since thumbnailers, except for the very basic
> ones, will usually not benefit from previously performed file manager
> initialization, except probably g_type_init() to use GdkPixbuf, this
> doesn't take much time).

For one single image we're talking about milliseconds. For large
directory with thousands of images, you can save more, because you can
save repeated loading of shared libraries.

I was thinking about thumbnailer modules implemented in the exactly
equal way as GdkPixbuf loaders.

But yes, such thumbnailers must not crash. You can always write a
wrapper to use executable thumbnailer.

OT: It may be an interesting idea to write a wrapper to use binary
GdkPixbuf loader. Probably not much useful.

-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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