Re: A few issues with thumbs.el

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>>> - I wish there was a way to put the thumbs directly next to the original
>>> image files.  E.g. instead of ~/.emacs-thumbs/foo!bar!baz!toto!NNNN.jpg
>>> I'd like to use ~/foo/bar/baz/.emacs-thumbs/toto_NNNN.jpg.
>> What are the benefits of doing this?
>
> Locality.  I find the concept of locality to be extremely important.
> E.g. if I rename the directory "foo/bar/baz" to "off/bar/baz" it will just
> keep working without any need to recreate thumbs.  If I delete the
> directory, the thumbs will automatically be deleted with the images, ...

You can't create thumbnails when viewing images in directories
with read-only permissions.

>> I think it would litter the system with extra directories.
>
> What are the problems with that?  It'll still be a negligible fraction of
> the disk space and of the number of directories on the disk.
>
> Other advantages: the number of files in a .emacs-thumbs dir will this way
> not be larger than the number of files in any other directory, so it'll
> automatically avoid suffering from the all-too-common problem where some
> Unix file systems don't handle large directories efficiently (things like
> O(n) lookup (and worse) behavior).

Theoretically this is reasonable, but from a practical POV this approach
is too intrusive.  I had unpleasant experiences with earlier Gimp versions:
often Gimp created thumbnail subdirectories where it really shouldn't do
this, (e.g. in backup directories) when simply previewing image files in
the File Open dialog.  Fortunately Gimp developers realized this annoyance
and fixed it in Gimp 2 to put all thumbnail images in ~/.thumbnails/.

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