Tumbler - Thumbnail Service
Contents
Introduction
Tumbler is a D-Bus service for applications to request thumbnails for various URI schemes and MIME types. It is an implementation of the thumbnail management D-Bus specification described on
https://wiki.gnome.org/DraftSpecs/ThumbnailerSpec
written in an object-oriented fashion using GLib and GObject. Its modular architecture makes it very flexible and useful in many situations. It provides plugin interfaces for extending the URI schemes and MIME types for which thumbnails can be generated as well as for replacing the storage backend that is used to store the thumbnails on disk. Tumbler’s functionality can also be extended via specialized thumbnailer services implemented in accordance to the thumbnail management D-Bus specification.
Tumbler is used by Thunar, Ristretto, Xfce.
Configuration
You can override the default cache directory $HOME/.cache in which, besides other non-essential files, thumbnails are stored:
- D-Bus/ systemd
create a file below ‘’~/.config/environment.d/’’ and inside set XDG_CACHE_HOME. E.g:
‘’XDG_CACHE_HOME=$HOME/.my_new_cache’’
- Other
Extend $HOME/.profile, $HOME/.bash_rc or similar
‘’export XDG_CACHE_HOME=$HOME/.my_new_cache’’
After that, re-login, make sure the variable is set, and check if it works fine.
Tumbler has a configuration file tumbler.rc described in a [[available_plugins#configuration|dedicated page]].
Available Plugins
Tumbler allows to load a number [[:xfce:tumbler:available_plugins:|additional tumbler plugins]] to support different file formats. Most plugins are loaded by default, if the required libraries are provided.
Standards compliance
Tumbler supports and implements the following standards/specifications:
Debugging Support
Tumbler currently supports four different levels of debugging support,
which can be setup using the configure flag --enable-debug (check the
output of configure --help):
`full' Use this if you want to debug Tumbler to locate a bug. The
build will most probably be noticably slower. This is also
recommended for people that want to develop Tumbler stuff.
`yes' This is the default for git snapshot builds. It adds all
kinds of checks to the code, and is therefore likely to run
slower. Use this if you want to develop for Tumbler (e.g.
writing Tumbler extensions and such).
`minimum' This is the default for release builds, and presents the
recommended behaviour.
`no' Disables all sanity checks. Don't use this unless you know
exactly what you do.
Required packages
Tumbler depends on the following packages:
GLib >= 2.50.0
Tumbler can optionally use the following packages:
gdk-pixbuf >= 2.14.0 (various image formats, some of them requiring the installation of optional libraries specific to gdk-pixbuf; also required for all other plugins below)
FreeType >= 2.0.0 (font)
FFmpegthumbnailer >= 2.0.0 (video)
GStreamer >= 1.0.0 (video)
Poppler >= 0.12 (PDF/PS)
libgsf >= 1.14.9 (ODF)
libopenraw >= 0.0.4 (RAW images)
libpng >= 1.2.0 (for the Thumbnail Managing Standard storage backend)
libgepub >= 0.6.0 (EPUB)
Latest Release
{{rss>https://archive.xfce.org/feeds/project/tumbler 1 date description 2h}}
Source Code Repository
Reporting Bugs
[[:xfce:tumbler:bugs|Reporting Bugs]] – Open bug reports and how to report new bugs
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