Bug 399966 - Folder thumbnails are noise at small sizes
Summary: Folder thumbnails are noise at small sizes
Status: CONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: dolphin
Classification: Applications
Component: general (show other bugs)
Version: 18.08.2
Platform: Other Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Dolphin Bug Assignee
URL:
Keywords: usability
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2018-10-18 06:03 UTC by Tyson Tan
Modified: 2023-07-29 13:56 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

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Description Tyson Tan 2018-10-18 06:03:11 UTC
SUMMARY
By default Dolphin displays thumbnails for folders. I suggest we change that. Reasons being:

1) It looks awful with all those tiny thumbnails of different sizes and orientations scattering on a folder's already small icon face. It doesn't give an impression of professionalism and reliability.

2) For our small default icon size, we can't learn much from those thumbnails. So they are pretty much useless distractions.

3) The option to turn if off is not very easy to discover, because the responsible checkbox is overwhelmed by a list with other file types.


SUGGESTIONS

1) Folder thumbnails should be turned off by default

2) Or, only show folder thumbnails when icon size is above a certain threshold

3) Align and crop 4 displayed thumbnails into 4 squares, making it tidy-looking

4) Move [ ] Folders checkbox out from the Preview file type list, put it right below the "Show preview for:" text. Because in normal people's mind, a folder is not a file, it is what holds files, and thus should not be treated equally.

Thank you!
Comment 1 Kai Uwe Broulik 2018-10-18 06:41:23 UTC
The thumbnails could be aligned more nicely. The old "randomly rotated with a picture frame" was the taste of the time when this feature was created. I disagree that they should be disabled by default.
Comment 2 Nate Graham 2018-10-18 19:13:25 UTC
As with many things, people tend to clamor for options and changing default settings when there's something wrong with an imperfect default. It's usually better to fix first, and then if that's not enough, you can go back and investigate whether changing the default makes sense.

I agree with Kai that having the previews rotated is a little odd and I'll agree with you that they're mostly distracting noise at small sizes. We can probably do something about those.
Comment 3 Alexander Potashev 2019-02-02 21:03:24 UTC
(In reply to Tyson Tan from comment #0)
> 2) Or, only show folder thumbnails when icon size is above a certain
> threshold

I support this idea. The threshold can be set to 0 by default so as to preserve the current behaviour for uninformed users.