Skip to content

Getting AVIF thumbnails in XFCE4 thunar (Debian Trixie)

Posted by Daniel Lange on
DebianInternet

The AVIF image format gets more and more popular in the web dev community, so I needed to teach XFCE4's thunar (file manager) and Ristretto (image viewer) to thumbnail these.

Luckily that is not too hard:

Debian Trixie separates its gdk-pixbuf libraries slightly differently than previous versions. That's why it is not "automatically there". Ensure you have the libavif-gdk-pixbuf plugin and the tumbler service (which XFCE uses to process thumbnails):

sudo apt --update install libavif-gdk-pixbuf tumbler

Thunar has likely tried (and failed) to load your AVIF files before you installed the package, it will have saved a blank or "broken image" placeholder in a thumbnail cache directory. It will not attempt to regenerate them unless you clear this cache:

# Clear the thumbnail cache
rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/*

# Force-quit thunar and the tumblerd background service
thunar -q
pkill tumblerd

Tumbled will restart on its own when it is needed. When you open thunar again and navigate to your image directory ... your AVIF images will now generate thumbnails automatically like the other image format did already.

Avif thumbnails in thunar

Trackbacks

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

Bock on :

Thunar had tried, failed, remembered the failure and sensibly refused to reconsider.

The fix is simple: clear its memory and make it try again.

A surprisingly human solution. 🦌

Add Comment

Markdown format allowed
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

Form options

Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.