Thumbnail shareing

[Jens Finke <jens triq net>]

Hello all,

I am working on the image collection component within Eye of Gnome. One
missing major feature is the persistant caching of generated thumbnails. I
think it would be very nice if Eye of Gnome and Nautilus could share image
thumbnails to avoid thrashing the users harddisk with multiple versions
of one image. This could also involve other programs like Gimp. So, what
I propose here is a general method for saveing thumbnails.

AFAICS there are two issues which prevent this currently in Nautilus:

1. The global thumbnail directory is ~/.nautils/thumbnails, which is
obviously bad. I would suggest to use ~/.gnome/thumbnails instead. The per
directory .thumbnails can be reused anyway.

2. The other thing is, that most of the generated thumbnails contain the
Nautilus specific frame around them. This looks quite nice within Nautilus
but it makes them unuseable for other programs. Maybe these add-ons could
be generated on the fly and not stored to disk. [BTW: Since I've read the
sourcecode I finally understand that the frame depends on the image size.
What's the idea behind this?].

What do the Nautilus people think about thumbnail shareing? Is such a
coorporation desired?

Regards,

   Jens