Nautilus, the Gnome file assistant manager, sucks utter donkeyballs. Let us make an unordered list of the ways:

  • If the underlying filesystem changes, say a copy operation, the file manager view does not update without a manual refresh by CTL+R. This leaves the view in a stale state, presenting false file information to the user, who might never know until they do something bad. This is a showstopper bug that’s been hanging around since forever.

  • Batch rename. Good luck trying to rename a series of files ordered sequentially by number, if the number happens to start with any number other than one. A sequence from 2 to x is impossible to batch rename. Because regex in sed never worked either. No, wait. It’s always worked! For like, 50 years.

  • Why, when moving a collection of files or a directory within the same filesystem, does it actually perform a copy and delete operation, taking cpu and time, when the inode location could just be updated like mv does?

  • Thumbnails? Why do they take longer to generate for images and video than than the totality of the existence of the universe?

Nautilus is an unusable mess. If command line file utils were this bad, we’d never be able to reliably store and manipulate files. Who in their right mind actually uses this junk?

  • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
    65·
    1 year ago

    I am not sure. The only option to configure being able to see thumbnails is setting a file size limit larger than your video file size in Edit>Preferences. It caches all thumbnails into /home/USERNAME/.cache/thumbnails/ path, and you might have to test with a video if it parses manually, or if it picks thumbnail supplied by photo/video.

    You are at the mercy of file manager (or plugin) developer who implements the frame that will be picked up, whether it be frame 1, first second, or 20% duration frame etc. Something like Directory Opus on Windows is supreme because of these niche needs. Your option in such cases might possibly be a file manager that uses external plugins like Double Commander, or Total Commander Extended addons edition via WINE.

    • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      I set those limits, I made sure all the plugins to do with thumbnailing are there, and so on. I’m genuinely not sure anymore if it even can work like I want it to.

      Whatever I do, Thunar shows an arbitrary frame of the video as its thumbnail, not the embedded one.

      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
        65·
        1 year ago

        So I am a data hoarder, and I manually tested just now. In my experience, Thunar shows the 33.33% duration frame of any video that it can process, otherwise if it cannot process some video (some MPEG-TS files for example), it shows the first possible frame it can fetch, usually the first frame of video.

        • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
          2·
          1 year ago

          Thunar shows the 33.33% duration frame of any video that it can process

          Yeah, that seems to check out. If I research it, I’m not really finding any conclusive evidence that Thunar can actually show embedded thumbnails, so idk