For a couple of weeks, instead of seeing thumbnails in my Nautilus folders, I just see the default “Still Loading” icon. This is very annoying to me. Searching around people just suggest deleting the folder where thumbnails are cached.
If you need to debug Nautilus, like if it continues to have trouble creating thumbnails, look into the debug log options on this page. This didn’t help me very much- the thumbnailers don’t seem to output but you may find something useful with that log file.
If that’s happening to you, do these things:
- First try the simple solution- F5 which tells Nautilus to refresh. Sometimes it just hasn’t displayed the thumbnail it has ready for you. If that doesn’t work, continue to step 2.
- In a terminal, run
rm -rf ~/.thumbnails - Now run
killall nautilus
When Nautilus restarts, it will begin creating thumbnails right away.
What I noticed is that when I opened a folder with lots of files, the thumbnailing would proceed quickly whenever you do the last two steps in my list above (clearing the thumbnail cache and restarting nautilus). A visual way of debugging is to then look for the first file that is trying to create a thumbnail and is not succeeding. For me it’s stopping on creating a thumbnail for an html file. gconf, the GNOME Configuration Editor, tells me when I search (Edit > Find) for ‘html’ that those thumbnails are handled by gnome-web-photo from the openSUSE-11.1-OSS repository. You can, in gconf, just disable that thumbnailer and restart Nautilus again.
But I want html thumbnails! Must have them! So I get the command that is being run from gconf and run it directly in the terminal like this:
gnome-web-photo --mode=thumbnail --size=256 records.html ~/Desktop/records.png
with this result:
(gnome-web-photo:16037): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: cannot register existing type `GtkMozEmbed'
** (gnome-web-photo:16037): CRITICAL **: void gtk_moz_embed_realize(GtkWidget*): assertion `GTK_IS_MOZ_EMBED(widget)’ failed
I’ll figure it out eventually. I’m betting it’s because I’m using Firefox 3.5 from the mozilla repository on the openSUSE Build Service and I see that I have three separate versions of xulrunner installer. I don’t know for sure but I believe xulrunner provides the files this is choking on. Again, I could be wrong.
Keep in mind that you may also be hitting a ceiling on how much space your thumbnails are taking up. People have tons of files, photos, documents, movies and once these each have a thumbnail, it’s possible to overwhelm the 512 MB that GNOME sets aside for use by the thumbnailers. It may be enough, but if you have a big hard drive, you can up the limit like this:
- Open gconf and search for ‘thumbnail’
- In the search results select ‘/desktop/gnome/thumbnail_cache’
- In that node there are two options, maximum_age and maximum_size. maximum_size’s tip says “Maximum size of the thumbnail cache, in megabytes. Set to -1 to disable cleaning.” and maximum_age’s says “Maximum age for thumbnails in the cache, in days. Set to -1 to disable cleaning.”. I set them both to -1 but I’m guessing I will change maximum_age to something else since otherwise I will likely have stale thumbnails which is still a bit annoying.
- In a terminal, run
rm -rf ~/.thumbnails - Now run
killall nautilus
This might help you? http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7772645#post7772645
Thanks for your suggestions!
It didn’t work for me but I appreciate the idea- it’s probably a problem within gnome-web-photo itself. Thanks for the tip!
I encountered this problem a few hours ago. thumbnails were suddenly not being created for saved html or image (jpg / png / gif) files. neither of the above fixes worked for me but the above certainly did help me resolve the issue.
I too was getting the “WARNING **: cannot register existing type `GtkMozEmbed” error and I’m also using Firefox 3.5 from the mozilla repository on the openSUSE Build Service. (I believe FF3.5 uses xulrunner191).
Only a few hours ago I’d applied updates in opensuse 11.1 so i had a look at the ‘history’ file in ‘var/log/zypp’ to see what had been updated. here’s what had been updated:
libldap-2_4-2-32bit|2.4.12-5.5.1|x86_64||repo-update
mozilla-xulrunner190|1.9.0.14-0.1.1|x86_64||repo-update
libldap-2_4-2|2.4.12-5.5.1|x86_64||repo-update
mozilla-xulrunner190-gnomevfs|1.9.0.14-0.1.1|x86_64||repo-update
mozilla-xulrunner190-translations|1.9.0.14-0.1.1|x86_64||repo-update
openldap2-client|2.4.12-5.5.1|x86_64||repo-update
looking further back in the history log i saw that the previous version of mozilla-xulrunner190 was 1.9.0.13-1.1.1
so i used YAST to downgrade mozilla-xulrunner190 from 1.9.0.14-0.1.1|x86_64| back to 1.9.0.13-1.1.1|x86_64|
followed by running ‘killall nautilus’ and thumbnails are now being created again.
Wow, thanks Mark! I appreciate the tip.
Hi Dave, if you’ve got Firefox 3.5 installed you may have 2 versions of mozilla-xulrunner installed.
I have both mozilla-xulrunner190 (installed by opensuse by default – i think) & mozilla-xulrunner191 that was installed with FireFox 3.5. I think mozilla-xulrunner190 is needed by some core opensuse stuff and mozilla-xulrunner191 is only needed by Firefox 3.5 so please don’t go removing either package if you do have the both.
As I said, I only downgraded mozilla-xulrunner190 from 1.9.0.14-0.1.1 back to 1.9.0.13-1.1.1. I hope this helps.
hello again gents, i got fed up with the constant update reminders for xulrunner190-1.9.0.14-0.1.1 so i did a bit more meddling … and i think i’ve cracked it. i obviously did something wrong when installing Firefox 3.5 so here’s what i did to get xulrunner190 updated to 1.9.0.14-0.1.1 without it effecting thumbnail creation:
1. i used YAST Software Management to remove all of the following
(all being opensuse 11.1 x86_64, but I forget exactly which versions i had):
MozillaFirefox
MozillaFirefox-branding for Suse
MozillaFirefox-translations-common
mozilla-xulrunner191
mozilla-xulrunner191-translations-common
mozilla-xulrunner191-gnomevfs
mozilla-xulrunner190-translations-common
mozilla-xulrunner190-gnomevfs
(note: i left mozilla-xulrunner190 installed)
2. i used YAST Software Management to upgrade mozilla-xulrunner190 from 1.9.0.13-1.1.1 to 1.9.0.14-0.1.1
3. i used YAST Software Repositories to make sure the opensuse 11.1 repository for Firefox was configured as follows:
NAME: openSUSE-11.1-Mozilla
URL: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_11.1/
ENABLED = Yes
AUTOMATIC REFRESH = Yes
PRIORITY: 15
(note that openSUSE-11.1-Update is set at Priority 20 so setting the priority of the openSUSE-11.1-Mozilla repository to 15 means that I now see recommendations from this repository before the openSUSE-11.1-Update repository)
4. i used YAST Software Management to install all of the following from the openSUSE-11.1-Mozilla repository:
MozillaFirefox 3.5.3-1.2 (x86_64)
MozillaFirefox-branding-upstream 3.5.3-1.2 (x86_64)
MozillaFirefox-translations-common 3.5.3-1.2 (x86_64)
mozilla-xulrunner191 1.9.1.3-2.1 (x86_64)
mozilla-xulrunner191-translations-common 1.9.1.3-2.1 (x86_64)
mozilla-xulrunner191-gnomevfs 1.9.1.3-2.1 (x86_64)
5. i used YAST Software Management to upgrade the following to those from the openSUSE-11.1-Mozilla repository:
mozilla-nss 3.12.4-1.1 (x86_64)
mozilla-nss-32bit 3.12.4-1.1 (x86_64)
mozilla-nspr 4.8-1.1 (x86_64)
mozilla-nspr-32bit 4.8-1.1 (x86_64)
(i’m sure this is the key factor. i reckon i must have previously installed different packages from different repositories such as: openSUSE-Mozilla repo, openSUSE-11.1-Update repo, openSUSE-Factory repo and openSUSE-11.1-Oss repo).
I hope this helps you guys sort the thumbnail problem too.
This did sort it out for me too Mark, thanks for the info! The detailed instructions were great.
No need to kill Nautilus to force the regeneration of the thumbnails. A refresh of the directory is enough, at least on Ubuntu 10.04 beta (Lucid Lynx) which uses GNOME 2.29.
Thanks Jerome- that’s good to know. GNOME 2.29 is a newer version than I was using so maybe it’s been fixed since I encountered the problem.
Hi guys,
I just encountered this problem again when upgrading to Firefox 3.6.6
In a nutshell, there appears to be a conflict when both
mozilla-xulrunner191 (installed by FireFox 3.5)
AND
mozilla-xulrunner192 (installed by FireFox 3.6)
are installed together.
This was the fix using YAST Software Management:
1. Important! Do NOT remove mozilla-xulrunner190 (my current version is 1.9.0.19-0.1.1 (x86_64))
2. the FireFox upgrade to 3.6.6 results in the following installed packages:
mozilla-js192|1.9.2.6-4.1|x86_64
mozilla-xulrunner192|1.9.2.6-4.1|x86_64
mozilla-xulrunner192-translations-common|1.9.2.6-4.1|x86_64
mozilla-xulrunner192-gnome|1.9.2.6-4.1|x86_64
MozillaFirefox-branding-upstream|3.6.6-1.2|x86_64
MozillaFirefox|3.6.6-1.2|x86_64
MozillaFirefox-translations-common|3.6.6-1.2|x86_64
3. remove the following (that was installed by FireFox 3.5):
mozilla-xulrunner191
mozilla-xulrunner191-translations-common
mozilla-xulrunner191-gnomevfs
4. if the following exist, remove them also:
mozilla-xulrunner190-gnomevfs
mozilla-xulrunner190-translations
(BUT do NOT remove mozilla-xulrunner190)
Thanks Mark!
onya mate.
can’t believe I was blaming librsvg ( it was the culprit last time)