Getting AVIF thumbnails in XFCE4 thunar (Debian Trixie)

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:50:00 +0000

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.

Daniel Lange's blog (Entries tagged as xfce)

Getting AVIF thumbnails in XFCE4 thunar (Debian Trixie)