Issue 87: Recoll 1.17.0 not displaying thumbnails

Let me start by saying I find Recoll the best Linux desktop search tool even without thumbnails.

I produce illustrated documents, this makes me interested in using the new 1.17 version with the thumbnail preview feature. Unfortunately all my searches using 1.17 for common image files like jpeg, tiff, png do not display thumbnails in the results, instead generic mime icons are displayed. I have done the following installation and corrective actions in an attempt to solve this problem:

Installation actions taken: #Installed Recoll 1.17.0 via apt from a sid (unstable) repository on to my Debian system running a Gnome 3.2.1 desktop #Deleted ~/.recoll/xapiandb #From a terminal ran recollindex -z to build a new database.

Corrective actions taken: #I checked & can confirm that I have the following thumbnail directories in my home directory as per freedesktop.org spec & they are all populated with thumbnails; _{/.thumbnails/,} /.thumbnails/normal, _{/.thumbnails/large/,} /.thumbnails/fail/ # Did identical comparative image search using Recoll -v- Tracker to check the thumbnail were readable. Tracker displayed the thumbnails, Recoll did not. # Worked my way through the Recoll preferences, release notes, man page & manual to see if I had missed a configuration option, could not find anything directly relate to this problem.

Any useful pointers on how I can get Recoll to display thumbnails would be much appropriated.

Hi, and thanks for taking the time to report this.

I tried to reproduce the problem, on a virtual machine running Debian testing Wheezy, dist-upgraded just now, and I did find a problem, but it only occurs depending on the file paths, not always.

The problem occurs in the case where the file paths include characters that should be escaped when found inside an URI (recoll should url-encode the paths before computing the thumbnail hash but it does not currently).

Do your file paths contain any non-alphanumeric or non-ascii characters ? White-space for exemple would trigger the issue and would be common enough. If this is the case I’ll fix the code and I can provide a .deb for testing.

If the answer is no. the only thing to do would be to actually debug the issue, meaning building from source, adding a few debug messages, and searching where recoll is failing. If you are comfortable doing this, I can provide step by step instructions and the source files with added traces.

Thanks for the prompt response, on reading your reply I immediately thought it must be white-space in the file paths (I suspect all my non-system files have white-space in their paths). However, to double check I did a quick & dirty experiment to confirm this using some test jpeg files with no file path white-space. Unfortunately the thumbnail previews still did not get displayed. So I now suspect some debugging maybe necessary, in the mean time here are the description of the experiment:

# Created new directory with the following path: /home/james/recolltest/imgs # Populated directory with 5 jpeg image files with the following name sequence: img01.jpg - > img05.jpg # Viewing the directory in Nautilus hit F5 to refresh thumbnail display to confirm they are working. # Updated database from the Recoll GUI # Using Recoll advance search searched for img0*.jpg inside /home/james/recolltest/ all 5 files found no thumbnails displayed. # Went to ~/.thumbnails/normal and confirmed the existence of the thumbnail for these files

Assuming the above experiment is valid, then it would appear that the reason for the fault is not non-alphanumeric or non-ascii characters in the file path. I am happy to have a go at further debugging but I will need the step-by-step instructions you have offered (I haven’t done debugging in over a decade!)

Hi,

I am very sorry, I missed your answer, and just stumbled upon it while reviewing open issues (I have been busy with other stuff during the last two weeks). I’ll take another look at this in the next days and get in touch.

Ok. I did the exact same experience as you did, and I do see the thumbnails. I guess that we must get into poking around, and this would probably be more convenient through email. Would you mind contacting me at jf@dockes.org ?

jf

This is fixed in 1.17.3

(Reply via ja…@takein.eu):

Thanks for this update & revolving the thumbnail issue. Apologies for my non involvement my time recently has been totally taken up with a new job.

James