Nautilus does not show Desktop thumbnails

[Vish]

Binary package hint: nautilus

In Karmic, nautilus has not been refreshing the desktop thumbnails.

On a system that has been running for several hours, Steps to reproduce:
1: Take a screenshot or save a video clip to the desktop.
2: A] The thumbnail is not shown and the image gets stuck at the icon "image-loading" or uses the mime icon of the file type rather than the thumbnail.
- B] sometimes for screenshots/image files , the file is not shown on the desktop ,[space is available but file does not appear.]

On a fresh system everything works fine and the thumbanils are refreshed and screenshot/image files are always visible.

Workaround:
Open the Desktop in a browser :
- the thumbnails are automatically refreshed. [no need to press refresh *majority* of the time , but rarely refresh needs to be used.]
- for image files not visible , notice that the files are still not visible , now when the browser button "Refresh" is used , the files are visible in the browser and also on the Desktop.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Aug 20 10:38:56 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: nautilus 1:2.27.4-0ubuntu6
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-6.25-generic
SourcePackage: nautilus
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-6-generic i686

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

not reproducible here, could you open a bug on bugzilla.gnome.org since you're getting the issue there? Thanks.

[Vish (vish)]

Upstreamed...

Other details:
the / is a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic
the /home was an ext3 file system which was in-place upgraded to ext4 when I
installed Ubuntu Jaunty [in march] , this partition has not been formated
since.

This problem did not arise in Jaunty.[with the same /home partition]
The problem started only after I installed Karmic recently [~1 month ago]

So, it might be related to the fact that the /home partition was in-place
upgraded to ext4 , but still, Jaunty worked with no such problems.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for sent this upstream mac.

[Vish (vish)]

Attaching a screencast of the problem

[Vish (vish)]

But the file gets listed when i check with $ gvfs-ls

[Vish (vish)]

Could this be related to , nautilus hogging memory?

The system has been on for 15hrs and now i see that the nautilus memory usage
is 202.1 MiB. [~11%]

Usually when the memory rises like this , i restart X and the memory returns to
normal... but still that doesnt solve the thumbnails problem.

[Bernhard (b.a.koenig)]

Not sure if this is the same, but I can reproduce something similar very easily:
go to home/Desktop and type

"touch Screenshot-1.txt"

the file "Screenshot-1.txt" will not be on your Desktop! Dunno why, but this is only with certain filenames, e.g. it works without the dash in the filename.

[Bernhard (b.a.koenig)]

It seems that this only happens with files called "Screenshot-?", but they don't need to be image files, could be text files as well. That's one of the weirdest things I have ever seen in Ubuntu. :)

[Vish (vish)]

Wow , i was thinking the exact thing , but thought I sounded crazy!
I only imagined that it had something to do with the timing , but now i realize that the first screenshot , is labelled "screenshot" and the rest are labelled "Screenshot-?".

But thanks for confirming. This is true , when i take a screenshot on it is labeled "Screenshot-?" it does not show. but when i edit the label to "screensh-?" or any other label , it works...
Could you comment this on the upstream bug too?

[Vish (vish)]

This problem seems resolved... the thumbnails are displayed , and i havent noticed any problems recently.
Not sure which update has fixed this issue.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The current karmic version works fine here too, seems to have been fixed in an update

[Vish (vish)]

This bug report is being closed due to your last comment regarding this being fixed with an update. For future reference you can manage the status of your own bugs by clicking on the current status in the yellow line and then choosing a new status in the revealed drop down box. You can learn more about bug statuses at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status. Thank you again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please submit any future bugs you may find.

If anyone is still having this bug , you can reopen the bug

[kidd0nne (thekiddoinme)]

Hi,
just to note: I'm still in Jaunty & have encountered the same issue, out of the blue; have reinstalled nautilus and rebooted, problem fixed!

[Roosje (wilco-roos)]

I am on a new, clean installed Karmic, and it drives me nuts..
After a while (hours) files seem to disappear, for a short while opening the 'places-home-video' folder shows them all as normal, but some time (hours) later i see only 15-20% of the files that are there. A reboot fixes all, for a while at least.

System specs:

AMD 940 x4, Gigabyte 770 Mobo, Gigabyte GT220 vid, 4 GB 800 Mhtz Memory, Samsung spinpoint 1Tb, OS: Karmic 386

In case it has any thing to do with it ;-)

Wilco

[Santiago Roland (santiago-roland)]

This is my experience with this bug. I noticed that pressing F5 to refresh JPEG picture thumbnails in desktop set the mouse in holding wheel and every element was updated (like external drives) but image thumbnails dissapeared. Then i opened a nautilus file manager window and went to desktop folder and AT the same time, files appeared in both desktop and file manager window, this is image thumbnails... BUT after a while i noticed that some files were like invisible... this is my example. I downloaded 2 photos from my cell phone and placed in desktop. Then open gthumb to look at them with the forward arrows i can navigate to every image in the folder... then i forget those files... connect my cellphone again and donload 2 more photos... and i noticed that this 2 photos are the only one in my desktop so, i think "i must deleted those previous photos that i looked at with gthumb... funny, i don't remember deleted it anyway"... and do the same, open gthumb to look at my 2 new pictures... and pressing forward buttons... wow! i'm looking at 4 pictures!! the previous 2 pictures were not deleted... there are here and nautilus desktop is not showing them and file manager too...

this is weird.

[TerraRoot (terraroot)]

I've got this aswell, think it may have some thing to do with the old home dir, i did a fresh install of 9.10 but i kept my home dir and all the files. maybe a nautilus reinstall.

[Vish (vish)]

I'm re-opening thus bug. I can once again notice the thumbnails/images do not display properly.
This has been happening again since more than 2-3weeks. I'm noticing the same issues as reported in the latest comments.Problems start when the system has been running for long hours.
A restart fixes the issue.

@Sebastien Bacher: could you re-open the upstream task too?

[Santiago Roland (santiago-roland)]

Another comment is that this bug not only happens in Desktop JPEG images... it happens when making some copy&paste and deletion of images or pictures is the Pictures folder... in my case I maintain certain order of pictures in some folders and happens when I download images from my mobile phone... so I cut and paste several pictures from one folder to another using nautilus tabs and noticed that after few file handling it stops showing thumbnails of files in the same folder and in fact it shows no icons at all and no subfolders... is like it hangs when searching for files in that particular folder... if a second nautilus window is opened and you go to the same folder... it fixes and shows contents in both windows. It is very annoying because I have to Alt+F2 > "killall nautilus" and Alt+F2 > "nautilus" again...

Regards,

[gael (gael-dreher)]

Yet another comment is that this bug also happens on a system that is still using ext3 (upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic, no fresh install).

[Vish (vish)]

I'v been using the Lucid kernel (2.6.32-6) for nearly a week and I havent noticed this problem. The problem seems to have reduced a lot [maybe once in the whole week i might have had the problem , i didnt expect the new kernel to fix this problem hence i didnt make a note]

Previously i would have to restart nautilus almost 2-3 times a day and would need to restart system every 2days. [with kernel 32-6 , system has been running the whole week and i havent restarted my system the whole week nor did it require a restart]

Could someone else try it with the Lucid kernel too , maybe it might help ?

[Vish (vish)]

I'm running Lucid and I'm no longer facing this bug. Closing bug report.