Reusing Shotwell thumbnails in Nautilus

As I have lots of photos on my machine, thumbnails start to consume considerable amount of space on the disk.

Another problem, is that gnome-raw-thumbnailer isn't enabled in Ubuntu (Natty, Oneiric) by default anymore, so my raw photos don't get thumbnailed in Nautilus. And, if I enable it manually, thumbnails of vertical photos don't show with the correct orientation.

So, I have researched a bit the freedesktop thumbnail spec, gnome thumbnailer spec and how Shotwell stores its thumbnails and came up with a shell script that reuses Shotwell thumbnails for Nautilus.

Save the script below as /usr/bin/shotwell-raw-thumbnailer

#!/bin/bash
input=$1
output=$2

if [ -z $output ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 input output"
    exit 1
fi

file=`echo -n ${input##file://} | perl -pe 's/%([0-9a-f]{2})/sprintf("%s", pack("H2",$1))/eig'`
md5=`echo -n $input | md5sum | awk '{print $1}'`

shotwell_id=`sqlite3 ~/.shotwell/data/photo.db "select id from PhotoTable where filename = '$file'"`
if [ -z $shotwell_id ]; then
    gnome-raw-thumbnailer $input $output
    exit
fi

thumb=`printf ~/.shotwell/thumbs/thumbs128/thumb%016x.jpg $shotwell_id`
if [ \! -e $thumb ]; then
    gnome-raw-thumbnailer $input $output
    exit
fi

replaceWithLink() {
    sleep 1
    ln -sf $thumb ~/.thumbnails/normal/$md5.png
}

# gnome-thumbnail-factory doesn't support links
cp $thumb $output

# however, linked thumbnails work, so replace them after a delay
replaceWithLink &

In order to make it work, you then need to register it as a thumbnailer in Gnome, put this to /usr/share/thumbnailers/shotwell.thumbnailer

[Thumbnailer Entry]
Exec=/usr/bin/shotwell-raw-thumbnailer %u %o
MimeType=image/x-3fr;image/x-adobe-dng;image/x-arw;image/x-bay;image/x-canon-cr2;image/x-canon-crw;image/x-cap;image/x-cr2;image/x-crw;image/x-dcr;image/x-dcraw;image/x-dcs;image/x-dng;image/x-drf;image/x-eip;image/x-erf;image/x-fff;image/x-fuji-raf;image/x-iiq;image/x-k25;image/x-kdc;image/x-mef;image/x-minolta-mrw;image/x-mos;image/x-mrw;image/x-nef;image/x-nikon-nef;image/x-nrw;image/x-olympus-orf;image/x-orf;image/x-panasonic-raw;image/x-pef;image/x-pentax-pef;image/x-ptx;image/x-pxn;image/x-r3d;image/x-raf;image/x-raw;image/x-rw2;image/x-rwl;image/x-rwz;image/x-sigma-x3f;image/x-sony-arw;image/x-sony-sr2;image/x-sony-srf;image/x-sr2;image/x-srf;image/x-x3f;

So, what does this script do?

• When Gnome (or Nautilus) needs a thumbnail, it runs this script
• The script checks if the image has an entry in the Shotwell database (~/.shotwell/data/photo.db)
• Then it checks if Shotwell has a thumbnail for it (in ~/.shotwell/thumbs)
• If yes, the script returns the already generated thumbnail to Gnome - no generation needed, so it works much faster
• If Shotwell doesn't have the thumbnail, the call is delegated to gnome-raw-thumbnailer that generates a new thumbnail, the old-fashioned way
• If Shotwell's thumbnail was used, the script will asynchronously replace the thumbnail in ~/.thumbnails with the link to Shotwell's file, avoiding a copy on the disk

The last step is the one that saves disk space. Unfortunately, it is not possible to return a link right away to Gnome - it can't read it for some reason. However, by putting a link directly under ~/.thumbnails later works perfectly, even if we put a .jpg file under the name of .png (as required by a spec). Png is actually a worse choice for thumbnailing of photos due to its lossless compression, so the disk savings are more than twofold with this script.

The next step would be to rewrite this in C or Vala to make even faster and maybe even make Shotwell create these links right away when it generates the thumbnails.