April 23, 2025

Nautilus RAW Thumbnails Fix

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As you might know, I occasionally do street photography. The problem I encountered when I switched to Linux was that the default GNOME File Manager (Nautilus) couldn't display RAW thumbnails.

Nautilus can't render RAW thumbnails

However, I remember there was a fix for this problem, but I COMPLETELY forgot how. So I made this post to document the fix, and hopefully, it can help you solve the problem as well.

How to fix this issue?

I forked a repository from emuskardin/nautilus-raw-thumbnails (Credit and thanks to him!). However, the problem is that his repository doesn't support my RAW format (.RW2), and the code is a bit outdated, so it needed some fixes.

Changes I made

  • Fixed Panasonic Lumix .RW2 thumbnails by adding MimeType.
  • Replaced convert with magick in the .sh file, as convert is now deprecated.

Installation

  1. Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/ilhamfauzan/nautilus-raw-thumbnails.git
cd nautilus-raw-thumbnails
  1. Install dependencies
# For Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install exiv2 imagemagick libimage-exiftool-perl
# For Fedora
sudo dnf install exiv2 ImageMagick perl-Image-ExifTool
  1. Move thumbnailer config to system directory
sudo cp exiv2raw.thumbnailer /usr/share/thumbnailers/
  1. Move thumbnailer script to /bin and make it executable
sudo cp exiv2-thumbnailer.sh /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/exiv2-thumbnailer.sh

That's all, however theres might be a change. All will be updated in README.md in my repo ilhamfauzan/nautilus-raw-thumbnails

Credit