GiMP thumbnails for .xcf files appear only in Gimp, not in file explorers.

[Coeur-Noir]

Hi,

Gimp as a snap stores its thumbnails in ~/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails/

It's not the regular place to store thumbnails, which is ~/.cache/thumbnails/

By doing so, gimp-as-a-snap prevents other applications to make use of thumbnails for .xcf files, most notably files explorer ( Nemo, Nautilus and the like ).

Workaround for the moment, adding these lines to my fstab :

# .xcf thumbnails from gimp snap for any app
/home/user_1/.cache/thumbnails/ /home/user_1/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails/    none    bind
/home/user_2/.cache/thumbnails/ /home/user_2/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails/    none    bind
/home/user_3/.cache/thumbnails/ /home/user_3/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails/    none    bind

Now I can see thumbnails for my .xcf files in Nemo and Nautilus. I wrote « workaround for the moment » as I assume it won't hold long term as it kind of breaks some safety design.

So to make it short here : the bug is, as soon as you use gimp as a snap, you lose the ability of thumbnails for .xcf files in files explorers. Which is a painful regression when you work hours a day manipulating images.

Longer story : ⋅ https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/gimp-and-thumbnails-for-xcf-files/18131 ⋅ https://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=2053949 ⋅ https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/gimp-as-a-snap-no-thumbnails-for-xcf-files-in-nemo-gthumb/3799 ⋅ https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gimp/+bug/1883457 ⋅ https://askubuntu.com/questions/1250031/gimp-snap-and-thumbnails-for-xcf-files

[Coeur-Noir]

Note, also : there is no longer any thumbnailer for .xcf files available system side. By system side I mean outside of gimp and outside of snap framework.

gnome-xcf-thumbnailer is dead ( can't work with gimp 2.10.x ) so probably best solution might be to have a new updated thumbnailer for xcf files ?

[petaflot]

wouldn't this workaround be simpler?

# preserve already existing thumbnails
mv ~/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails/* ~/.cache/thumbnails/
# rmdir should work, but there may be hidden files
rm -rf ~/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails/
# now all thumbnails will be at the same place
ln -s  ~/.cache/thumbnails/ ~/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails

[petaflot]

also see

• https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/tumbler/-/issues/64
• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/8396

[lucyllewy]

No, @petaflot , that won't work at all and will potentially break GIMP in the process. The sandbox explicitly denies access to "dotfiles" in the user's home directory, including .cache/.

[Coeur-Noir]

A mount bind works, at least used to work, I gave up on Gimp as a snap, for that inability to show its thumbnails outside Gimp itself, amongst other things.

In /etc/fstab something like :

/home/user/.cache/thumbnails/	/home/user/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails/	none	bind

[Coeur-Noir]

@diddledani The symbolic link will work if you replace the legacy folder ~/.cache/thumbnails by a symlink that targets ~/snap/gimp/common/.cache/thumbnails because in that way, Gimp does not need to go out of its sandbox since it's actually all other applications which will look into ~/snap/… and I think it's what @petaflot's suggested.

It's the first « workaround » that came to my mind ago but I was worried all thumbnails for a session ended up stored into one particular « app » config folder - that's no sense. As previously said, I don't know if it still works with latest version of snapd