Superquick thumbnails in Gnome 3 for raw camera files

I do most of my shooting in Canon Raw (*.CR2) and convert to jpeg for display, but my Debian Testing system won’t show thumbnails for them: until now.  And as a bonus, it’s dead simple to do and they are produced really quickly.

You may or may not have ufraw-batch installed, but if you don’t just grab it out of the repositories.

sudo apt-get install ufraw-batch

And create a file using your favourite text editor (I use nano)

sudo nano /usr/share/thumbnailers/raw.thumbnailer

and paste the following in.

[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=ufraw-batch
Exec=ufraw-batch --silent --size %s --out-type=png --noexif --output=%o --overwrite --embedded-image %i
MimeType=image/x-canon-cr2;image/x-canon-crw;image/x-minolta-mrw;image/x-nikon-nef;image/x-pentax-pef;image/x-panasonic-rw2;image/x-samsung-srw;image/x-olympus-orf

Save it, reload your directory in Nautilus, and Robert’s your Mother’s brother!  And by using the embedded image in the raw file (I’m not sure if this is supported by all formats) it is super-quick.

Note: There used to be an Ubuntu package available called gnome-raw-thumbnailer, but I think this is faster!