On Plasma 5.24 there was an option in Dolphin under previews for the thumbnailer to ignore EXIF thumbnails. Now there isn’t and it always shows the EXIF thumbnail instead of generating one based on the actual image. This is a problem because images saved online can have blurry, flipped or wrong EXIF thumbnails.
Example:
files.catbox.moe/7n36d9.jpg
Save this image and look at it in Dolphin.
It shows the exif thumbnail for me, I made it an orange for this example.
I am using the latest Plasma, I wonder why yours is different.
Edit: it seems the link I posted to an external website which serves the original file was replaced by one of this website which automatically removes the EXIF thumbnail, which make the example not work. The filename in your pic is from the external site so I assume it’s the right one.
I edited the original link back into the OP (catbox.moe)
SHA256 of the original file for reference: ac936ffc5b323c8b5435119220a401cd356551337e3fad6768e7e864e7cc6ef9
Got it, can confirm the issue now.
If an image has a bad EXIF thumbnail, to me it would seem more sensible to remove that EXIF data for that one image instead of disabling this kind of preview for all images. Is it really that common that an EXIF thumbnail is bad to the point that one would rather fully disable this functionality?
EXIF thumbnails are more of a legacy feature to save on processing power on old hardware, they’re not really relevant anymore. Windows’ file manager disabled showing them a long time ago and I don’t doubt the same is true with Mac OS. When they do exist, they’re pretty much always low quality or flipped and prompt the user to look up why some of their images look bad. They’re relatively rare nowadays but dabble in collecting old media like me and you’ll no doubt run into them a lot.
I think they should be disabled by default, but able to be brought back in settings. Options never hurt anybody.
Removing the EXIF thumbnails every time I encounter them can be a mild inconvenience, but a more real issue is the fact that if you modify files like that, it can cause problems with software using those files. Torrent clients, for instance, will error if you modify files, so I’ll have to make copies for the de-thumbnailed versions which takes up extra disk space.
Alright. That makes sense.
I’d just like to make a correction, it seems there isn’t actually an option to turn these on or off in Plasma 5.24, I think I misremembered or if it does exist it’s part of a plugin. Plasma 5.24 has exif thumbnails disabled by default, which is still better.
Should this posted as a more formal kind of request on bugs.kde.org? It seems like a useful feature.
