Hello,

I have a bunch of pictures on my media server, but when I browse through them they do not show up as thumbnails, which is a pain when trying to find a particular picture.

I added an attachment to this message to visualize the exact problem.

I do not have access to a graphical interface to solve this problem. Is there a way that I can fix it otherwise?

Attached Thumbnails

 

Hi there,

that looks like Windows 7's Explorer.
I'm not sure about Windows, but some linux file managers (e.g. Nautilus) have the very sensible preset not to display thumbnails of image files on remote file systems, as that would imply a lot of additional network traffic - after all, that file manager would have to fully read every image file, instead of just displaying its file properties from the directory.

Don't you? I'd assume that this behavior of Windows Explorer is configurable. I know from years of Windows experience (which ends with XP) that there's very little about Windows Explorer that cannot be customized. It is possible, however, that there is no GUI for it and that you'll have to tweak things by directly editing the registry.

[X] Doc CPU

1 members found this post helpful.

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

Showing thumbnails is indeed an option that can be configured. When I browse pictures on my hard-drive, they do show up as thumbnails. Not when I try browse pictures on my media server. Therefore, I believe it has to be a setting somewhere on my server. That's what I meant when I said I do not have access to a GUI. The OS (Busybox) on my server is purely text-based.

edit: I did some testing. I thought samba was at error, but after all it was the Windows 7 explorer. After a registry-tweak I was able to get rid of the problem.

Seems like I was looking entirely the wrong way to find a solution.

Hi there,

oh no, not on the server! You're mxing things up here.
Thumbnailing is an action that happens on the client side (if it does), that is, on the Windows PC in your scenario. It doesn't matter if the server has a GUI or not. The client just requests a directory listing from the server, and then, if configured that way, retrieves each file and generates the thumbnails. It may store the thumbnails somewhere to speed things up next time (that's where those garbage files called thumbs.db come from), but it's definitely a matter of client, not a server configuration.
That's why I told you it must be some Windows setting. However, since Windows 7, Microsoft is so intent on hiding so many features that were easily accessible in Windows 2000 and XP. :-(

What I said. ;-)

By the way: For working with directories containing mostly image files, using a dedicated image viewer/browser might be a good idea. IrfanView is a very common one, my personal favorite on Windows was XnView.

[X] Doc CPU