thumbnailer-service(1)

NAME
thumbnailer-service - Thumbnailer service

SYNOPSIS
thumbnailer-service

DESCRIPTION
The thumbnailer-service program provides a DBus service for creating thumbnail images from local media files (photos, audio, and video files), as well as album cover artwork and artist images for many musicians and bands. Original images and scaled thumbnails are cached on disk, so requests for a thumbnail for a previously retrieved image (whether in the same size or a different size) are delivered as efficiently as possible. The service is fast and scalable, and it guarantees the integrity of on-disk data structures even in the face of a crash or power loss. The service is activated on demand by DBus and, by default, shuts down after 30 seconds of idle time. The service connects to the DBus session bus as com.canonical.Thumbnailer. The interface to retrieve thumbnails is provided at the path /com/canonical/Thumbnailer, and the administrative interface (see thumbnailer-admin(1)) is provided at the path /com/canonical/ThumbnailerAdmin.

CONFIGURATION
The service uses dconf(7) for its configuration. See thumbnailer-settings(5) for details.

ENVIRONMENT
The service reads the following environment variables:

THUMBNAILER_UTIL_DIR
    The directory in which to look for the vs-thumb executable, which is used to extract images from streaming media. If not set, the program is expected to be in /usr/lib/<arch>/thumbnailer.

THUMBNAILER_MAX_IDLE
    The service exits once it has been idle for the number of milliseconds specified by this variable. If not set, a default value of 30000 is assumed.

THUMBNAILER_UBUNTU_SERVER_URL
    This variable overrides the URI of the remote image server. If not set, the default URI https://dash.ubuntu.com is used.

THUMBNAILER_LOG_LEVEL
    This variable overrides the value of the log-level setting.

XDG_CACHE_HOME
    This variable determines the location of the on-disk caches. Caches are written to subdirectories of $XDG_CACHE_HOME/unity-thumbnailer. If XDG_CACHE_HOME is not set, $HOME/.cache/unity-thumbnailer is used. If $HOME is also not set, the home directory is determined by its setting in /etc/passwd and home-dir/.cache/unity-thumbnailer is used.

SEE ALSO
thumbnailer-admin(1), thumbnailer-settings(5), dconf(7), gsettings(1)