RGBE or Radiance HDR thumbnailer

Tips and Tricks
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RGBE or Radiance HDR, also know as “HDRI image”, uses .hdr file extension (rarely .hdri), image/vnd.radiance

It is used in 3d software as an image for skyboxes/backdrops, at least it is primary use case I know. Anyways, if you go to computer graphics assets websites, this is what you will find under “HDR images” section. Usually images of this format store panoramic 360 photos capturing entire environments.

What’s interesting, almost nowhere it is called by its official or original names “RGBE or Radiance HDR”.

For some reason I couldn’t find any thumbnailers in the internet for linux for this specific file format, so I made my own, following free desktop specification. It calls imagemagick and seems to generate correctly sized thumbnails.

Paste the following snippet into /home/username/.local/share/thumbnailers/hdr.thumbnailer

[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=/usr/bin/magick
Exec=/usr/bin/magick %i -resize %s %o
MimeType=image/vnd.radiance

Then restart dolphin and enable “Radiance HDR image” thumbnailer in dolphin configuration, previews tab.

You need to install imagemagick.

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You might need to chmod u+x /home/username/.local/share/thumbnailers/hdr.thumbnailer, I can’t remember.

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It works without execution permission.

Also, forgot to add. Since it uses imagemagick, it should be able to chew through almost any picture format, you can expand this thumbnailer by simply adding more mime types with a delimiter between them (forgot what symbol is used for delimiting, do your research).