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

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!

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
- wget http://a.imageshack.us/img135/8666/thumbnailframe.png
- sudo mv thumbnailframe.png /usr/share/pixmaps/nautilus/thumbnail_frame.png
- killall nautilus
Restore to original
- wget http://a.imageshack.us/img651/5790/thumbnailframey.png
- sudo mv thumbnailframey.png /usr/share/pixmaps/nautilus/thumbnail_frame.png
- 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!
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.
Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; Ubuntu/10.10; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.61
Sure. I’ve just been busy lately, but I’ll see what I can do as soon as I get a little free time to play around with this.
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?
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!
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!