Improved Thumbnails In Nautilus

If you’re using Ubuntu 10.04 or newer then you’ve probably seen the borders around your thumbnail pictures and movies.

This is how your images look by default.

You may like them with a thick white border, but if you’re looking for something a little sharper then give my thumbnail frame tweak a try!

This is how they look with my tweak!

The image that you’ll be downloading to use from me gives the thumbnails a drop-shadow effect and gives them a bit of a 3D stylish feel rather than a rounded clunky feel.

Open a terminal window and copy/paste the following commands to install or remove.

How to Install

  1. wget http://a.imageshack.us/img135/8666/thumbnailframe.png
  2. sudo mv thumbnailframe.png /usr/share/pixmaps/nautilus/thumbnail_frame.png
  3. killall nautilus

Restore to original

  1. wget http://a.imageshack.us/img651/5790/thumbnailframey.png
  2. sudo mv thumbnailframey.png /usr/share/pixmaps/nautilus/thumbnail_frame.png
  3. killall nautilus

Enjoy the new style thumbnails if you like them! This was brought about by a thread at UbuntuForums.org entitled “Changing the Nautilus ugly thick white border for thumbnails“. You can post either here or at the forums for help or general friendly comments!

9 thoughts on “Improved Thumbnails In Nautilus”

  1. using Firefox 3 Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 10.04 Ubuntu 10.04
    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.8

    Thanks Kyle, I really didn’t like those white borders. One question though. Could you make another version, one that adds a black border to the picture as well (in addition to the shadow, like the one from Karmic)? That would be perfect.

    Reply
  2. Pingback: ..:: Huseyin Kaya ::.. » Blog Archive » Thumbnails in Nautilus aanpassen.
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  5. using Firefox 4 Firefox 4 on GNU/Linux GNU/Linux
    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101104 Firefox/4.0b8pre

    Great tip!

    I’ve replaced thumbnail border with my own image but it reverts to original one after some time (probably due to updates – didn’t check it out, yet).
    Do you have any idea how to prevent this?

    Reply
    1. using Opera 11 Opera 11 on Mac OS X 10.6 Mac OS X 10.6
      Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6.4; U; en) Presto/2.7.38 Version/11.00

      I’m glad you like it. Updates are the only thing that would change it back to default, but the only thing I can think of to fix this would be “cron jobs”. Its a little geeky, but it would fix this for you.

      Basically, cron jobs run on a routine period, so if you set it to replace the icon routinely then that would make sure its always what you want.

      You can find more on cron jobs here:
      https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto

      There are gui applications you can install that make setting these super easy. Best of luck! Once again, glad you like my work! Cheers!

      Reply
      1. using Firefox 4 Firefox 4 on GNU/Linux GNU/Linux
        Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101105 Firefox/4.0b8pre

        I know about Cron and script that replace thumbnail from time to time was first I thought about, but I was hoping maybe there is more elegant way to prevent update of this file.

        For now simple cp in /etc/rc.local should do the job.
        Thanks!

        Reply
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