Disable thumbnail creation for specific folders only, but all users

Question

How do I prevent my Ubuntu 14.10 (now 15.04) from creating and saving thumbnails for a specific folder only?
I want to tell the thumbnailer to skip over that single folder (and subfolders), but for all existing and future user accounts.

I read some answered questions about excluding a specific file type, but I need to exclude files by their location!
What I already tried is to hide the folder (renamed to .foldername), but with no luck. The folder is owned by root, by the way.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

In addition to @Fabby answer:

Install the package inoticoming
```
sudo apt-get install inoticoming
```

Create wrapper script disable_thumbnails

#!/bin/bash

# Create the thumbnail filename
tn_filename=$(echo -n "file://$1/$2" | sed 's/\s/%20/g' | md5sum | awk '{print $1}')

# Destroy the thumbnail without deleting
find ~/.cache/thumbnails -type f -name "$tn_filename*" -print0 | while IFS= read -d '' file; do
  echo > "$file"
done
exit 0

Make it executable
```
chmod +x disable_thumbnails
```
Kill running processes, if necessary
```
killall inoticoming
```

Watch your folder

Avoid a trailing / for the folder names

inoticoming "<path_to_disabled_thumbnail_folder>" <full_path_of_disable_thumbnails_script>  {} "<path_to_disabled_thumbnail_folder>" \;

There is only one problem. The changes are only visible after nautilus -q

Use inoticoming --foreground … to avoid the daemon mode, if you test the script.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 16 '15 at 07:05

To get the file name for the thumbnail, start md5sum for the original file name:

% echo -n "file:///home/user/Pictures/image%201.png" | md5sum
6e1669aea9c118cb2b7ad23fc6646c71  -

% find ~/.cache/thumbnails -type f -name "6e1669aea9c118cb2b7ad23fc6646c71*"
/home/user/.cache/thumbnails/large/6e1669aea9c118cb2b7ad23fc6646c71.png

Now remove the read permissions:

chmod -r /home/user/.cache/thumbnails/large/6e1669aea9c118cb2b7ad23fc6646c71.png

Restart nautilus:

nautilus -q

and you will have no thumbnail for /home/user/Pictures/image 1.png.

Now you only have to write a script that scans your particular folders and do the above steps automatically.

_{Credits :P}

Disable thumbnail creation for specific folders only, but all users

2 Answers2