Nautilus hangs when TIFF file properties are requested

[Dino brown]

Ubuntu 12.04.01 LTS - all updates current
Nautilus 3.4.2

All Nautilus windows hang when the properties of a TIFF file are requested. One must "force quit" to close all windows and relaunch Natulis again. This happens for files in all folders in the Home directory EXCEPT the Desktop folder. On the desktop, the TIFF file properties are displayed properly.

What I did: Open Nautilus and navigate to the Pictures folder. Right mouse click on a TIFF file and select Properties. I expected the Properties dialog box to be displayed and to move through the tabs to view properties information. Instead, the properties dialog opens and all Nautilus dialog boxes freeze until a force quit is issued.

The same problem has been reported under Fedora: Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 839371 - Properties dialog hangs with TIFF images.

Red Hat suggests the problem may be with GdkPixbufLoader

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: nautilus 1:3.4.2-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-31.50-generic 3.2.28
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-31-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu13
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Sep 23 15:54:56 2012
GsettingsChanges: org.gnome.nautilus.window-state geometry '800x550+65+24'
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120823.1)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Joshua Taillon (jat255)]

It would seem that this bug is related to tracker and that it has happened before (see archlinux forum post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=937784).

I can confirm this by running `sudo mv /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-3.0/libnautilus-tracker-tags.so /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-3.0/libnautilus-tracker-tags.so.bak`

I used to have problems when opening the properties dialog on large tif files, but after removing the nautilus tracker library, all seems well. This points to a problem in tracker, I would think. Unfortunately, I don't know much about how it works. I can just offer the workaround for now.

    josh@josh-ThinkPad:~/.local/share/applications$ tracker-info -V

    Tracker 0.14.1

    This program is free software and comes without any warranty.
    It is licensed under version 2 or later of the General Public License which can be viewed at:

     http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks Joshua for tracking that issue

[Joshua Taillon (jat255)]

I actually think I should retract that previous comment. It seemed to work right away, but now about an hour later I am having the same problem, even after killing all tracker processes. Perhaps it's not quite related...

[Dino brown (durinsbane)]

Interesting. In may case, I don't have Tracker installed and don't have
the libnautilus-tracker-tags.so file. There's nothing to re-name!

Also, in my case, it doesn't seem to matter how big the TIFF file is,
they all crash Nautilus. However, all my TIFF files are a bit large by
some standards.

The really odd thing is that if I move the TIFF file to the Desktop, I
can view the properties without any problem. But, it does not seem to
be a folder properties issue.

Thanks for your feedback.

Dino

On 10/05/2012 10:35 AM, Joshua Taillon wrote:
> It would seem that this bug is related to tracker and that it has
> happened before (see archlinux forum post:
> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=937784).
>
> I can confirm this by running `sudo mv /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-3.0
> /libnautilus-tracker-tags.so /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-3.0
> /libnautilus-tracker-tags.so.bak`
>
> I used to have problems when opening the properties dialog on large tif
> files, but after removing the nautilus tracker library, all seems well.
> This points to a problem in tracker, I would think. Unfortunately, I
> don't know much about how it works. I can just offer the workaround for
> now.
>
>
> josh@josh-ThinkPad:~/.local/share/applications$ tracker-info -V
>
> Tracker 0.14.1
>
> This program is free software and comes without any warranty.
> It is licensed under version 2 or later of the General Public License which can be viewed at:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
>

[Dino brown (durinsbane)]

The same problem occurs with .CR2 files. CR2 files are Canon RAW files and are usually 20-30 MB from my camera. Canon's CR2 format may be similar to TIFF. I note that although the properties of both the TIFF and CR2 files are visible when the file is on the Desktop (Ubuntu 12.04 x64), the data may not be complete ... there is not much more than file size and density available.

[Eugene Romanenko (eros2)]

Same bugs: Bug #1043614, Bug #987274

[Eberbachl (eberbachl)]

I have the same problem here on Ubuntu 13.04 AMD64. The problem is only apparent when viewing the properties of a tiff file. Jpeg, Pentax RAW (PEF), and Adobe RAW (DNG) are unaffected. Nautilus hangs and greys out. The only solution is to force quit and restart nautilus. For what it's worth, all of the tiff files were created by GIMP 2.8.

[Eberbachl (eberbachl)]

Sorry, further to my above comment, it should read that jpeg files are unaffected, but Pentax RAW (PEF), and Adobe RAW (DNG) files suffer the same fate and are affected in the same way that tiff files are!

[Saren Taşçıyan (sarentasciyan)]

I have a similar problem and it involves so far large tiff files. I always had issues with applications freezing on Ubuntu. For these using strace always revealed underlying reasons. Most the time it was unaccessible network drives. However, in this case it seems to be that nautilus trying to read the whole file or is in some kind of loop within the reading process of the file. The file I have is 19GB on external HDD.