Re: [Tracker] thumbnails location

["Erlend Davidson" <erlend davidson gmail com>]

On 12/04/2008, mike <mhardy_mail yahoo com> wrote:
> I just wanted to say I like tracker because it's small
>  and does a good job - thanks for it.
>  
>  I have a request having to do with its thumbnails (I
>  like having them, don't use gnome/kde/xfce so don't
>
>  know what else would generate them so don't want to
>  turn it off in tracker).
>  
>  The request is that:
>  
>  a) tracker use an app-local thumbnails dir, such as
>  ~/.cache/tracker/thumbnails, which I have seen other
>
>  apps keeping data local for themselves like this

AFAIK they can't do this: it breaks the freedesktop.org thumbnail storage specification.
 

>  or
>  
>  b) allow a ./configure option to specify where they
>  should go

That would still break the spec.
 

>  or
>  
>  c) during routine indexing if tracker discovers
>  thumbnails that used to exist but are now gone it can
>  regenerate them?
>  
>  
>  Part of the reason for the request is because I see
>  that if I delete a thumbnail, tracker will no longer
>
>  display its associated hit in tracker search GUI.  IOW
>  if I delete everything in ~/.thumbnails and do a
>  tracker search, 0 results are returned.

IMHO tracker-search-tool should generate thumbnails.  That's what file-managers do, and in many ways t-s-t is like a file-manager. 
 

>  But far more importantly (because I want to keep all
>  of tracker's thumbnails), this is an issue because I
>
>  use other apps which dump crap in ~/.thumbnails
>  (gqview for example) meaning ~/.thumbnails ends up
>  with thousands (and tens of thousands) of files
>  totalling hundreds of megs.

This is a problem with the thumbnails specifications choice of the png format as the file-type for all thumbnails.  A 128x128 colour thumbnail in png format might be about 20kB; the same thumbnail in jpeg format would be about 10kB ... and that's using the unnecessarily high 100% quality jpeg.

I suppose in the end it comes down to relative amounts though: if you have enough images to give hundreds on megabytes of thumbnails ... then you must have a large hard drive and in proportion to all those images 200MB is quite small.
 

>  Because some of these thumbnails were generated once
>  then many months (or years) later never accessed
>
>  again, they're a HUGE waste of space; so I run a cron
>  job cleaning ~/.thumbnails out every couple of weeks
>  by +atime.
>  
>  But now that tracker is mixing its in with these other
>  mostly useless thumbnails, I can't do that anymore.

Actually I think you can.  Looking at the thumbnail spec here: http://people.freedesktop.org/~vuntz/thumbnail-spec-cache/creation.html, there is sometimes a tag in the thumbnail saying who created it.