As one can resize the icons on desktop (not within nautilus) through righ-click menu: "Resize icon..", so where is the size stored for that certain file.
File attributes for icons are stored in binary files inside ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/.
To read an attribute for a file you need to use the gvfs-info command supplied by the gcfs-bin package.
To read the complete metadata stored from a file/folder on the gvfs use gvfs-info -a "metadata::*" <path_to_file/folder>, ie
gvfs-info -a "metadata::*" /home/bruno/Desktop/Screenshot at 2011-12-14 21:29:29.png
attributes:
metadata::icon-scale: 2.6875
metadata::nautilus-icon-position-timestamp: 1323894580
metadata::screen:
metadata::nautilus-icon-position: 77,15
To set an attribute inside the gvfs you use the command gvfs-set-attribute which is also part of gvfs-bin as this gvfs-set-attribute <path_to_some_file/folder> metadata::some-key "some_value"
If you want to change the scale of an icon in gnome you need to change the icon-scale attribute so for the file shown before if I wanted to reset the scale to 1 would do that as this
gvfs-set-attribute /home/bruno/Desktop/Screenshot at 2011-12-14 21:29:29.png metadata::icon-scale "1"
Unfortunately I could only see the changes after I logged off and back in on, unity --replace & did not do the trick. I am not sure if you can force Gnome to reload the data from the gvfs binaries.
