Hallo all you Linux Guru,

while I was trying to free some disk space on my Gnome Gutzy release, I found out that Gnome created some hidden, unwanted, unespected, Desktop directory called ".thumbnails": inside it there where others three directory called: "fail, large and normal".
each one contains thousands thumbnails with a wide range of contents, I belive these thumbs regards everythings I made since I installed my Gutsy Ubuntu release.

Is there anyone able to tell me why this happened? why so much disk space wasted? why this unuseful and unasked activity?

These thumbnails are created by nautilus. In the nautilus preferences there is a parameter to turn thumbnails on or off. The way to turn them off is to start nautilus, click on Edit -> Preferences -> Preview. Set Show thumbnails to Never.

Then delete all of your .thumbnails directories.

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Steve Stites

Great suggestion, thank you very very much!

Well, having those thumbnails makes your system perform better. If you have pictures, Gutsy will have to create new thumbnails for them every time you go into your picture directory. If you have a lot of pictures, that can time quite some time. If you scroll down the directory, you will notice that picture previews take quite a bit of time to display. By keeping a repository of thumbnails it already made, Gutsy can skip that part and display your pictures straightaway. So unasked it may be but certainly not useless.

so does this folder get wiped or updated every now and then?
or will it keep storing thumbnails for every possible picture i will ever possess?

That can be configured. I use an application called Ubuntu Tweak to do so.