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I have a simple setup: Linux server at home with a huge drive; that drive has a photo library (hundreds of folders, hundreds of gigabytes). The drive is shared with multiple Windows and Mac clients using Samba.

Question: is there a utility I can run to pre-generate all thumbnails inside a folder, so that my clients would be able to navigate the library faster?

Thank you.

Alex
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  • One promising direction, but only for Mac: http://www.phillips321.co.uk/2013/08/14/synothumb-py-only-does-pics-but-is-for-os-x/ – Alex Dec 08 '13 at 06:58
  • One other lead: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34112.0 – Alex Dec 08 '13 at 23:59
  • See the Edit to my answer. – MariusMatutiae Dec 09 '13 at 07:39
  • @MariusMatutiae I don't see your answer, looks like it disappeared – Alex Dec 09 '13 at 20:00
  • [This was asked a while back.](http://superuser.com/questions/17364/is-it-possible-to-preload-all-thumbs-db-files-in-a-directory) There still seems to be no way to do it. – Synetech Dec 15 '13 at 06:17
  • `I don't see your answer, looks like it disappeared` When he figured out what you were asking, he updated his answer to say that he can’t find any way to do it, then deleted it. – Synetech Dec 15 '13 at 06:19

1 Answers1

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Windows and Mac use different cache formats to store thumbnails.

Thumbs.db is deprecated for the Windows platform, since Vista, they've been stored in a proprietary database located in C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer on each individual computer.

For Mac OSX and later, the thumbnail cache is stored in ~Library/caches/ on each individual computer.

So, as the "disappeared" answer earlier started, there is no way to pre-generate thumbnails for Windows Explorer or Mac Finder. What one could do, is pre-generate folders with thumbnail'd images. I do this for my personal photo library, I have a cron script to run imagemagick over new images to generate a 100x100 thumbnail.

Josh
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Chris S
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