Re: A few issues with thumbs.el

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>> Have you seen the thumbnail-spec, which is apparently poised to become a
>> freedesktop.org standard?  It seems to allow usage of the same
>> thumbnails by several programs.
>> 
>> <http://jens.triq.net/thumbnail-spec/>
>
> I have now... :)
>
> Seems quite good although I don't like the idea of using PNG-files as
> their size is much larger than using JPEG.

PNG is more optimal for small images like thumbnails.

> The file names are named according to the absolute URI's MD5 value,
> which most in this thread seems to dislike (including myself).

This specification is _already_ implemented in Gimp.  Since Gimp is
the primary GNU image manipulation program, this is the _de-facto_
GNU standard for creating thumbnails.

Gimp users already have the directory ~/.thumbnails.  Some time
ago thumbs.el was added to the Emacs CVS tree which uses the
~/.emacs-thumbs directory for thumbnails.  And now you've created
a new package that uses yet another directory ~/.tumme.
All these three directories are used for the same purpose.
This is a waste of user space.

The above-mentioned specification is well thought out, and the list of
advantages of this approach is convincing.  So the best thing for us
to do now is just to follow this standard and to share the same
standard thumbnail directory with other GNU programs.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/