After applying this update, thumbnails for GIF and JPEG files always fail to generate. Both worked fine before the update was applied.
Heya, what distro are you using? In general it’s probably more a distro problem. I would advise to ask on their forum/chat.
This looks like a known regression or packaging issue rather than a user-side misconfiguration.
There have already been similar reports after recent GNOME updates where image thumbnails (especially JPEG/GIF) stop generating. In many cases, the root cause is not GNOME itself but missing or broken dependencies in the distro (e.g. thumbnailer backends like gdk-pixbuf or the newer glycin stack).
In fact, GNOME developers have pointed out in similar situations that thumbnail failures are often tied to library or sandboxing issues rather than Nautilus directly.
Also worth noting: after an upgrade, failed thumbnail attempts are cached, so even if the issue is fixed later, thumbnails won’t regenerate unless the cache is cleared.
- Ensure required thumbnailer packages are installed (depends on distro; e.g. glycin-thumbnailer on Fedora-based systems)
- Clear thumbnail cache (
~/.cache/thumbnails, especially the fail directory) - Verify file permissions and that thumbnails are enabled for local files
- Test whether the issue persists in another file manager (helps isolate GNOME vs system issue)
If this started immediately after updating to 50.1, I’d strongly suspect a distro packaging bug or missing dependency rather than a core GNOME regression.
You should report it (or search for duplicates) in your distro’s issue tracker as well, since upstream GNOME alone usually isn’t the whole picture here.
I notice this on Gnome Files 46.4 in the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS system. List View no longer updates thumbnails. I have deleted the Thumbnail cache, but still no preview Thumbnails.
Hey and welcome to the forum. Sadly GNOME 46 isn’t supported for quite some time now and like I said above, problems like these are usually distro’s fault. You need to report it to Ubuntu.