SUMMARY Currently the Preview setting uses an all or nothing approach: generate thumbnails for all folders or none at all. It is possible to limit the previews per mime category, but it's not possible to exclude certain folders from that setting. Allowing such configuration has several benefits: - It allows users to exclude folders that contain very many media files for which the preview generation is unnecessary or has a negative effect on the system stability. - It makes it possible to skip folders on slower mechanical drives - It allows users to skip folders for privacy reasons SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Antergos KDE Plasma Version: plasmashell 5.15.4 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.57
Hello Isaak, if I understand your report correctly, this feature is actually already present in Dolphin. Go to the Settings->General->View and choose "Remember properties for each folder". Afterwards, the preview setting will work on a per-folder basis. Be aware that this also let's Dolphin remember other changes to the view properties, such as Details mode vs Icon mode or the icon size. Does that fulfill your needs or have I misunderstood your request?
Hi Julian That's indeed one way to do it, but it's not really efficient. It'd be more useful if a setting could be applied on a specific folder that only manipulates the Preview behavior and does that recursively in subfolders.
New information was added with comment #2; changing status for inspection.
Changing status for inspection.
Hi there, I agree with Isaak that it's definitely much more useful if a setting could be applied to a specific folder AND every other sub-folders inside it. For now the "Show previews of files and folders" toggle only applies to that specific folder, and not any sub-folders inside it. It also doesn't disable thumbnails generation on the tooltip when you hover over a specific folder, EVEN if "Show previews of files and folders" was disabled for that specific folder and its parent folder.
Also I noticed that this KDE Vaults folders already have themselves blacklisted from the thumbnails generation. It'd be lovely if users could extend this themselves if they chose to use other third-party folder encryption tools. Or even when simply mounting a separate encrypted disk, cause thumbnails are being generated into $HOME/.cache/thumbnails.
"Remember properties for each folder" remembers ALL properties for each folder: the view type (list / compact list / tree), icon size, etc. This is undesirable. I want to be able to use common properties for all folders, EXCEPT for thumbnailer settings which I DO want to be able to override per directory.
Also what is REALLY desired here is the ability to completely and consistently DENY the thumbnailing subsystem ACCESS to certain files. This isn't what "Show thumbnails" checkbox does: it prevents thumbnails from being shown in the dolphin directory view, but when you hover on a file, Dolphin will still generate its thumbnail and show it in the properties pane. What is desired is the ability to **prevent the thumbnail file under the .cache directory from ever possibly being created**, and **this** should work per-directory.
Additionally this should also help in performance of KDE Connect's file system browsing. Browsing the st she of a device connected with KDE Connect has awful loading time in the beginning, because Dolphin attempts to generate thumbnails for everything it lays its eyes upon. Temporarily turning off the "Show previews ..." toggle doesn't seem to mean anything to the actual background thumbnailer. It indeed doesn't show the previews, but it's still actually generating them in the background anyways.
A byproduct of this behaviour is that by default network mounts are scanned as well, this may results in possibly undesired network traffic outside of the user's control.
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
To my horror I just had to discover that thumbnails of all my encrypted stuff have been lying around in the thumbnail cache for years. I know it's my fault not thinking about this possibility in the first place - but that you cannot blacklist folders just blew my mind. UnGNOME this!