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I am struggling to have RAW Thumbnails show in Nautilus. I am using Ubuntu 21.04 & specifically Sony ARW from Sony A6000, Nex 6 & Nex 3 cameras. All of these use the same arw with embedded jpg thumbnails.

In Nautilus I just see a generic icon.

I tried a method to enable the mime-type image/x-sony-arw in pixbuf-thumbnailer, but it didn't work. I think Sony arw is simply not supported by pixbuf.

I also tried a method to add rawtherapee.thumbnailer & have rawtherapee do the work - this works! but it's painfully slow & very unsatisfactory.

It's rather a glaring flaw not to have such a ubiquitous format of the last decade unsupported on the Linux consumer flagship.

Can you help with this?

RiquezJP
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    It's rather a glaring flaw not to have such a ubiquitous format of the last decade unsupported on the Linux consumer flagship. Please make sure Sony is aware of your requests. Whether or not a specific OS supports a given proprietary format depends on the IP owner, not the OS itself. – ChanganAuto Jul 27 '21 at 13:10
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    It seems the format is easily supported by plenty of OSS apps such as shotwell, nomacs, darktable, rawtherapee. Ill admit my statement is scathing: this is a genuine problem & my frustration is real. – RiquezJP Jul 27 '21 at 13:22
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    I think this question is on topic here, and someone might be able to suggest a better way than your rawtherapee workaround, but I wonder if you might want to make a feature request for Nautilus (or report a bug against it) as well. – Zanna Jul 28 '21 at 04:13
  • Thank you. I have submitted a feature request. The ubuntu bug reporting process is quite complex, so I need to spend more time to educate myself with that. – RiquezJP Jul 28 '21 at 07:45
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    It seems that Nautilus is not actually responsible for thumbnails & the thumbnailer systems are separate. LibOpenRaw / gnome-raw-thumbnailer DOES support ARW files, but pixbuf (included with Ubuntu) does not. Im not exactly sure how to install LibOpenRaw / gnome-raw-thumbnailer, so any answer including that would be really welcome - thanks. – RiquezJP Jul 28 '21 at 12:58

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gThumb can also generate thumbnails. First install gThumb, then delete the thumbnail cache with rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/* and close Nautilus. Then open gThumb and navigate to the folder with the .ARW files. Thumbnails will be generated and they will also appear in Nautilus.

cristian mos
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  • Thanks Cristian. This DOES work!

    I have 400GB of raws in 100's of folders, so its quite a pain to browse all those in gThumb, just so they will show up in Nautilus. & then each time I add a new photo I have to open Thumb first. Really its better just to use gThumb & not use nautilus.

    So its quite less than perfect, but I appreciate you giving this method, it is useful.

    I think this highlights even more strongly how Nautilus has a very poor implementation. It can display raw thumbnails, but you have to manually add them like this.

     – RiquezJP Aug 21 '21 at 00:06
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    It's a thumbnailer problem. A few years ago I was usig ufraw to generate raw thumbnails with a thumbnailer file similar to pixbuf-thumbnailer, and it was excellent. But ufraw was abandoned by the developers and it's not present in the repositories anymore. – cristian mos Aug 21 '21 at 10:03