8 Thumbnail Creation Failures #
Due to several reasons its possible that the generation of a thumbnail fails:
The file format is unknown and cannot be loaded by the program.
The file format is known but the file is somehow broken and thus cannot be read.
The generation of a thumbnail would take too long, due to the large size of the file.
Under some circumstances a program want to preserve the information that the creation failed. Eg to avoid trying it again and again in the future. The problem is that the above mentioned issues are often program specific. Eg Nautilus can't read the native Gimp format xcf but of course Gimp can and could create thumbnails for them. Or one program uses a broken TIFF implementation which refuses to load an TIFF image but another one uses a correct implementation.
Because of this, its best to save these failure information per
program. In the Directory Structure
section there is already a 'fail' directory mentioned, which should be
used for this. Every program must create a directory of it's own there
with the name of the program appended by the version number
(eg. $XDG_CACHE_HOME/thumbnails/fail/nautilus-1.0).
For every thumbnail generation failure of a readable image, the program creates an empty
PNG file. If it's possible to obtain some additional information from
the image (see Store Additional
Information) they should be stored together with the thumbnail
too, at least the required 'Thumb::MTime' and 'Thumb::URI' keys must be
set. The procedure for the saving of such a fail image is the same as
described in Thumbnail Saving. You must
only use the application specific directory within
$XDG_CACHE_HOME/thumbnails/fail instead of the size specific ones.
This approach has the advantage that a program can access information about a thumbnail creation failure the same way as it does with successfully generated ones.