Supporting shared thumbnail repositories and video update

 Greetings! After 84 yea…. 17 days I’m back with another blog-post. This time a shorter one, since most of my work has been on finishing the features that I talked about last week and

implementing support for shared thumbnail repositories (as specified in freedesktop.org).

 Support for Shared thumbnail repositories: For 15 years the #SHARED part of the freedesktop.org thumbnail specification has been ignored by the vast majority of Linux file managers. At last, the
time has come for Thunar to be one of the first, if not the first, file managers that support shared thumbnail repositories. ‘What are shared thumbnail repositories’ I hear you ask. Let me explain. Imagine
that you have a large external hard drive that contains family photos (something that most, if not all of us have). Connecting it in a new PC or as a different user would normally lead to thumbnailing
for all the files that are visible in your file manager. That process is both slow and wasting space. That is the problem that shared thumbnail repositories solve. Instead of creating and storing thumbnail
in the default location of the PC filesystem, thumbnails are stored locally in the USB/HDD/CD. It is a niche but potentially extremely useful feature.

 I’ve linked a video that showcases the stuff that I’ve talked about in these blogposts, with the exception of shared thumbnail repositories. Even though the code is complete and it works as it should
there has been a problem with Tumbler while refactoring. Specifically, it looks like Tumbler doesn’t use libxfce4util, where I placed some shared code to avoid duplication. Hopefully next time I’ll be able to
show them to you.

Link to all my Merge Requests: link

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