Introduction#
When installing Gnome on Arch Linux I only installed the base packages, as a result the thumbnail generated did not work out of the box.
Solution#
In this case the fix is very simple, it just requires the installation of a few packages
sudo pacman -S ffmpegthumbnailer gdk-pixbuf2 tumbler poppler-glib libopenraw gnome-epub-thumbnailer
Package Breakdown#
ffmpegthumbnailer- This package selects a frame from videos to store in the Gnome thumbnail cache folder so that it can be displayed by the file managergdkpixbuf2- This is a core gnome library to support image loadinggdkpixbuf2-thumbnailer- This library generates thumbnails for basic image formatstumbler- This is a general thumbnail generator originally developed for XFCE, but that also works with GNOMEpoppler-glib- This is a thumbnail generator for PDF fileslibopenraw- This is a thumbnail generator for .raw image filesgnome-epub-thumbnailer- GNOME package to generate thumbnails for EPUB files
Additional Steps#
For thumbnail generation to work properly you may also need to clear the thumbnail cache using the command
rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/*
Then either restart your system or restart your file manager, in my case I restarted nautilus.
