Why is Nautilus listing so slow when showing thumbnails?

I have a folder with thousands of photo on it. Every time I enter the folder (even in the same Gnome session) Nautilus start showing the icons (thumbnails) for that folder but the listing is very slow. Furthermore, the window's vertical bar, moves and shriks as the list grows, so every time I have to wait for the list to finish before I can comfortably scroll up and down my pictures. Why does this happen ?

Note: it is not a matter of thumbnails rebuild since if I scroll down the bar last images icons are displayed properly.


Solution 1:

Perhaps you can try turning off thumbnail rendering as a workaround: in Nautilus go to Edit>Preferences>Preview, and try turning a few of those options off.

I asked a similar question in the Inkscape user forum, and got this answer:

AFAIK the library used by Nautilus to render the preview thumbnails for SVG files (librsvg) supports fewer SVG features than Inkscape, and chokes on certain filter effects and linked images (IIRC of type 'jpeg' or 'tiff'), and possibly other items too. See also: Bug #305546 in librsvg (Ubuntu): “Nautilus crashing/freezing when opening folder with svg file”. Nothing Inkscape can do about that-> needs to be addressed in Nautilus (don't freeze) and librsvg (handle failures to render certain SVG files more graciously).

The bug report is here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/librsvg/+bug/305546. Does that sound familiar?