Thumbnails do not update on first display

Please can you give more details as the circumstances this bug appeared including:

1) Where the media files were stored (and whether it makes a difference)
2) Were the files generating thumbnails newly created or being modified?
3) What happens if you press the reload button (on the right of the location bar)?

1) On the hard disk of the local machine; I haven't tested with removable drives or remote shares.
2) No.
3) Didn't notice that reload button; thumbnails do appear after reloading--but it also reloads the state of the interface in "List" view.

It's good news that the reload button works, but I would rather not need any such feature in a file manager.

It is inconvenient that in "List" view, if the user has several levels of folders open, they will be collapsed by reloading.

Pantheon-files would look and feel better if it updated for changes automatically.

This branch is in preparation: lp:~jeremywootten/pantheon-files/fix-1458398-option-thumbnail-remote. But I am not sure it is relevant as you say the problem relates to the local file system.

I haven't notices any general problem with thumbnailing existing local files. Are you getting the problem with all views and all types of image files? Which version of Files are you running and are you running it in ElementaryOS?

I tried creating and saving new .gif, .png and .jpg files using Gimp and saving them in a folder that was being displayed in Files - they were immediately thumbnailed without pressing reload. I was using the latest stable version of FIles (0.2.4 rev 1980) on a development version of ElementaryOS (daily ppa). The only thing I noticed was that if a file was renamed *without an image file extension* it was not thumbnailed until reload was pressed. However, once it had been thumbnailed, the thumbnail was reloaded automatically from then on. Could this be connected to your issue?

All views, all filetypes regardless of extension.

I am using pantheon-files 0.2.4-1 in ArchLinux.

It's quite possible I'm missing something that exists in ElementaryOS.

What is the mechanism behind the immediate thumbnailing?
Does pantheon-files itself watch for changes, or is there some interaction with a DBus service, etc?

Files uses a DBus proxy to interact with tumbler thumbnailing service. I don't have experience of ArchLinux but if that service is not provided or is different in some way, it could be the cause of the problem

What provides that DBus service in ElementaryOS?

Is it part of Gala, gnome-session, pantheon-files itself, or another component?

What is the service called? (org.freedesktop.Something?)

ie, tumbler comes with these services:

tumbler /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.Tumbler.Cache1.service
tumbler /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.Tumbler.Manager1.service
tumbler /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.Tumbler.Thumbnailer1.service

These appear to be working, in that thumbnailing works at all, but for some reason not immediately.

On Freya, Dbus is provided by the Debian (Ubuntu) package dbus - version 1.6.18-0ubuntu4.3

I have the same tumbler DBus services installed and the Files thumbnailer connects to "org.freedesktop.thumbnails.Thumbnailer1":

    thumbnailer->thumbnailer_proxy =
        dbus_g_proxy_new_for_name (connection,
                                   "org.freedesktop.thumbnails.Thumbnailer1",
                                   "/org/freedesktop/thumbnails/Thumbnailer1",
                                   "org.freedesktop.thumbnails.Thumbnailer1");

This is the contents of /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.Tumbler.Thumbnailer1.service on my machine:

Name=org.freedesktop.thumbnails.Thumbnailer1
Exec=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/tumbler-1/tumblerd

Tumbler-plugins-extra is also installed but not ffmpeg-thumbnailer

The Tumbler-plugins-extra package provides the tumbler-ffmpeg-thumbnailer.so plugin so if you do not have this it could affect video thumbnailing?

Archlinux doesn't seem to have a separate package for the plugins, the tumbler package provides these libraries:
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/cache/tumbler-cache-plugin.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/cache/tumbler-xdg-cache.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-cover-thumbnailer.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-ffmpeg-thumbnailer.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-font-thumbnailer.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-jpeg-thumbnailer.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-odf-thumbnailer.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-pixbuf-thumbnailer.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-poppler-thumbnailer.so
tumbler /usr/lib/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-raw-thumbnailer.so

I also have ffmpegthumbnailer installed.

Other DBus services are working.

It works fine with the bzr tip.

I will work with that for now.

I have reproduced this bug by deleting all existing thumbnails. When a folder is displayed, the thumbnails are created OK but the view is not updated to show them. The linked branch addresses this problem.

Pantheon dev-team is best dev-team!