On 07/28/2010 12:36 AM, Damjan Jovanovic wrote:
freedesktop.org has a spec for a shared thumbnail cache (http://triq.net/~jens/thumbnail-spec/index.html), but no accepted spec for a file browser to request that a file be thumbnailed: there's a draft DBUS thumbnailing spec that's been heavily discussed last year but it still isn't ready or adopted by any/most desktops (http://live.gnome.org/ThumbnailerSpec).
I was thinking that what we could do, is when we generate a .lnk file on the desktop, we also write a thumbnail for it to the shared thumbnail cache - that way the desktop environment doesn't need to ask us to generate a thumbnail since it already exists. But then the cache could be cleared out periodically meaning we'd eventually lose the thumbnail. Winemenubuilder could work around this by regenerating all thumbnails that are missing on every startup. But even if this is acceptable solution, it's still hard to implement, because the thumbnail cache spec requires specific thumbnail sizes (128x128 or 256x256) and a special pixel format (256 colour indexed-mode PNG IIRC) which means we'd need to resize and colour convert the icon(s), and it needs special PNG comments on the thumbnails which windowscodecs doesn't support even on Windows AFAIK. So is this idea viable?
That spec will need to be updated. Gnome recently started supporting thumbnails that are smaller than the overly large 128x128 (actually I think it was 96x96 originally). gnome-exe-thumbnailer now relies on this behavior to render properly, in the past when it was forced to large sizes it looked incredibly ugly.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie