Score:0

RAW Thumbnails in Nautilus (Sony .ARW)

cn flag

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?

ChanganAuto avatar
us flag
*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.
RiquezJP avatar
cn flag
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.
Zanna avatar
kr flag
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.
RiquezJP avatar
cn flag
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 avatar
cn flag
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.
Score:1
km flag

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.

RiquezJP avatar
cn flag
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.
cristian mos avatar
km flag
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.
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