General installation instructions

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Thumbnailers in repositories and PPAs

A number of thumbnailers are pre-packaged and can be easily installed from the software center or the command line. These thumbnailers don't require any additional configuration and should work right after restarting nautilus. You can do so with:

nautilus -q 

Please consider reading these Q&As before installing anything from a PPA:

What are PPAs and how do I use them?

Are PPA's safe to add to my system and what are some "red flags" to watch out for?

Custom thumbnailing scripts on Ubuntu 11.04 and above

Custom thumbnailers that aren't available in repositories have to be installed manually. These are the steps you will have to take to install them:

Check out whether the script has any dependecies listed. If so, install them first.

Download the script and make it executable with chmod a+x filethumbnailer or via Nautilus

Designate a folder in your file system for all future thumbnailers and move the script to it, e.g.

mkdir $HOME/.scripts/thumbnailers && mv filethumbnailer $HOME/.scripts/thumbnailers

Next you will have to register your script with Nautilus. To do so create a thumbnailer entry in /usr/share/thumbnailers. The entry should follow the naming scheme foo.thumbnailer where foo is an expression of your choice (here file):

gksudo gedit /usr/share/thumbnailers/file.thumbnailer

The thumbnailer specifications follow this scheme:

[Thumbnailer Entry]

Exec=$HOME/.scripts/thumbnailers/file.thumbnailer %i %o %s

MimeType=application/file;

The Exec entry points to your thumbnailer script while the MimeType field designates the related MimeTypes. Possible variables are:

%i Input file path

%u Input file URI

%o Output file path

%s Thumbnail size (vertical)

The specifications and variables will vary with each script. Simply copy and paste the content of the respective text box into the file and save it.

The thumbnailers should be up and running after restarting nautilus (nautilus -q).

Custom thumbnailing scripts on Ubuntu 11.04 and below

Earlier versions of Ubuntu rely on GConf for thumbnailer associations. See here for more information.

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Sources:

https://live.gnome.org/ThumbnailerSpec

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=636819#c29

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-exe-thumbnailer/+bug/752578

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1881360

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Thumbnailers by file type

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CHM files

Overview

Description: With this script you'll get thumbnails of your chm files
in the nautilus file manager. The script uses the largest image from
the homepage of the chm file to generate the thumbnail, usually this
will be an image of the front cover.

Creator: monraaf
(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1159569)

Dependencies: sudo apt-get install python-beautifulsoup python-chm imagemagick

Thumbnailer entry

[Thumbnailer Entry]

Exec=$HOME/.scripts/thumbnailers/chmthumbnailer %i %o %s

MimeType=application/vnd.ms-htmlhelp;application/x-chm;

Script

#!/usr/bin/env python



import sys, os

from chm import chm

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup



class ChmThumbNailer(object):

    def __init__(self):

        self.chm = chm.CHMFile()



    def thumbnail(self, ifile, ofile, sz):



        if self.chm.LoadCHM(ifile) == 0:

            return 1



        bestname    = None

        bestsize    = 0

        base        = self.chm.home.rpartition('/')[0] + '/'

        size, data  = self.getfile(self.chm.home)



        if size > 0:

            if self.chm.home.endswith(('jpg','gif','bmp')):

                self.write(ofile, sz, data)

            else:

                soup = BeautifulSoup(data)

                imgs = soup.findAll('img')

                for img in imgs:

                    name = base + img.get("src","")

                    size, data = self.getfile(name)

                    if size > bestsize:

                        bestsize = size

                        bestname = name

                if bestname != None:

                    size, data = self.getfile(bestname)

                    if size > 0:

                        self.write(ofile, sz, data)

        self.chm.CloseCHM()



    def write(self, ofile, sz, data):

        fd = os.popen('convert - -resize %sx%s "%s"' % (sz, sz, ofile), "w")

        fd.write(data)

        fd.close()



    def getfile(self,name):

        (ret, ui) = self.chm.ResolveObject(name)

        if ret == 1:

            return (0, '')

        return self.chm.RetrieveObject(ui)



if len(sys.argv) > 3:

    chm = ChmThumbNailer()

    chm.thumbnail(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2], sys.argv[3])

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EPUB files

Overview

Description: epub-thumbnailer is a simple script that tries to find a cover in an epub file and creates a thumbnail for it.

Creator: Mariano Simone
(https://github.com/marianosimone/epub-thumbnailer)

Dependencies: none listed, worked fine right away

Thumbnailer Entry

[Thumbnailer Entry]

Exec=$HOME/.scripts/thumbnailers/epubthumbnailer %i %o %s

MimeType=application/epub+zip;

Script

#!/usr/bin/python



#  This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify

#  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by

#  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or

#  (at your option) any later version.

#

#  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

#  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

#  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the

#  GNU General Public License for more details.

#

#  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

#  along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.



# Author: Mariano Simone ([email protected])

# Version: 1.0

# Name: epub-thumbnailer

# Description: An implementation of a cover thumbnailer for epub files

# Installation: see README



import zipfile

import sys

import Image

import os

import re

from xml.dom import minidom

from StringIO import StringIO



def get_cover_from_manifest(epub):

    img_ext_regex = re.compile("^.*.(jpg|jpeg|png)$")



    # open the main container

    container = epub.open("META-INF/container.xml")

    container_root = minidom.parseString(container.read())



    # locate the rootfile

    elem = container_root.getElementsByTagName("rootfile")[0]

    rootfile_path = elem.getAttribute("full-path")



    # open the rootfile

    rootfile = epub.open(rootfile_path)

    rootfile_root = minidom.parseString(rootfile.read())



    # find the manifest element

    manifest = rootfile_root.getElementsByTagName("manifest")[0]

    for item in manifest.getElementsByTagName("item"):

        item_id = item.getAttribute("id")

        item_href = item.getAttribute("href")

        if "cover" in item_id and img_ext_regex.match(item_href.lower()):

            cover_path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(rootfile_path), 

                                      item_href)

            return cover_path



    return None



def get_cover_by_filename(epub):

    cover_regex = re.compile(".*cover.*.(jpg|jpeg|png)")



    for fileinfo in epub.filelist:

        if cover_regex.match(os.path.basename(fileinfo.filename).lower()):

            return fileinfo.filename



    return None



def extract_cover(cover_path):

    if cover_path:

        cover = epub.open(cover_path)

        im = Image.open(StringIO(cover.read()))

        im.thumbnail((size, size), Image.ANTIALIAS)

        im.save(output_file, "PNG")

        return True

    return False



# Which file are we working with?

input_file = sys.argv[1]

# Where do does the file have to be saved?

output_file = sys.argv[2]

# Required size?

size = int(sys.argv[3])



# An epub is just a zip

epub = zipfile.ZipFile(input_file, "r")



extraction_strategies = [get_cover_from_manifest, get_cover_by_filename]



for strategy in extraction_strategies:

    try:

        cover_path = strategy(epub)

        if extract_cover(cover_path):

            exit(0)

    except Exception as ex:

        print "Error getting cover using %s: " % strategy.__name__, ex



exit(1)

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EXE files

Overview

Description: gnome-exe-thumbnailer is a thumbnailer for Gnome that will give Windows .exe files an icon based on their embedded icon and
a generic "Wine program" icon. If the program has normal execute
permissions, then the standard embedded icon will be shown. This
thumbnailer will also give a thumbnail icon for .jar, .py, and similar
executable programs.

Availability: official repositories

Installation

sudo apt-get install gnome-exe-thumbnailer

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ODP/ODS/ODT and other LibreOffice and Open Office files

Overview

Description: ooo-thumbnailer is a LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office document thumbnailer that can be used by Nautilus to
create thumbnails for your documents, spreadsheets, presentations and
drawings.

Availability: developer's PPA (most recent version that's compatible with LibreOffice in Ubuntu 12.04 and up)

Installation

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flimm/ooo-thumbnailer && apt-get update && apt-get install ooo-thumbnailer