KDE's Dolphin File Manager Can Now Show LibreOffice Document Previews

[cl333r]

Sounds a bit unnecessary. An A4 page of text shrunk down to the size of a thumbnail/icon is completely unreadable. It just looks like a replacement icon for an unknown file type, with some unreadable garbage on it.

Totally agree, somewhere I've had this and it felt exactly the way you said.
I'm also wondering *how* it's implemented, does it read preview icon from the .odt/.ods documents? If so it must be expensive since these are zip files and you have to unzip them somewhere and read from there.

[starshipeleven]

Totally agree, somewhere I've had this and it felt exactly the way you said.
I'm also wondering *how* it's implemented, does it read preview icon from the .odt/.ods documents? If so it must be expensive since these are zip files and you have to unzip them somewhere and read from there.

FYI, the system has already a thumbnail cache for images (it's stored somewhere in hidden folders in your home) in KDE.

I'd be surprised if it's not using it (i.e. creating the thumbnail when you change/create the file and then just loading it from the cache)

[quikee]

I'm also wondering *how* it's implemented, does it read preview icon from the .odt/.ods documents? If so it must be expensive since these are zip files and you have to unzip them somewhere and read from there.

You don't need to unzip the whole zip file to some location just to be able to read one file out of it. Zip file has an index of all files, where it states the filename, type of compression, compressed and uncompressed size and the the offset where the data starts. So getting the thumbnail is just reading the index to determine if there is a thumbnail and then going to the offset to get the thumbnail content - not much more complex than direct reading.

[ngraham]

Totally agree, somewhere I've had this and it felt exactly the way you said.
I'm also wondering *how* it's implemented, does it read preview icon from the .odt/.ods documents? If so it must be expensive since these are zip files and you have to unzip them somewhere and read from there.

Yes, that's exactly what it does. The operation is not expensive, for the reasons that quikee gives.

[chithanh]

I think this is bad from security perspective. This creates a large attack surface. Now every time Dolphin sees such a document, it will launch Open Document thumbnailer (I think based on Calligra) to parse and render it.

https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/linux_desktop_versus_windows10/

[ngraham]

I think this is bad from security perspective. This creates a large attack surface. Now every time Dolphin sees such a document, it will launch Open Document thumbnailer (I think based on Calligra) to parse and render it.

https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/sche...sus_windows10/

No, we didn't use the Calligra thumbnailer. It's a brand new one that just reads the thumbnail image inside the file.

[chithanh]

Ah, then it is not that bad (but still not good). It will at least limit the attack surface to the ZIP file parser and image viewer.

[Danny3]

Try MovieThumbs : https://store.kde.org/p/1081129/
It's also available for Plasma 5. I am very happy with it since years.

With KDE4 times I was using another tool, which also came with a cover thumbnail service for dolphin.
But this tool was even better. It was automatically adding tags of the movie (director, writers, stars, produces year, genre,...) found by imdb to Nepomuk (Baloo) and you were able to find similar movies just by a click at the tag in Dolphin.

That's pretty much what I want. Thank you very much!
It's a shame that KDE doesn't offer this by default, especially since matroska is an open format
On Windows I have added a few covers with MKVToolnix for my favorite movies and animations and they look great in the file manager and
Also it seems to me that it's easier and quicker to choose a movie when you can see its poster.
As a nice side effect, even very young children who can't read yet, can still choose their favorite animation. I have seen this first hand.
Hopefully, KDE developers will add this feature too.

[Nth_man]

Ah, then it is not that bad (but still not good). It will at least limit the attack surface to the ZIP file parser and image viewer.

When someone is writing comments there, he is opening an attack surface. There's a sure way of closing it...

On the other hand, as it has been written on the prevous page, you can disable those previews, that's the beauty of KDE

[skierpage]

sftp KIO up to 20x faster (https://phabricator.kde.org/D15452), yeah!!

I've been using sftp KIO in Krusader to sync up some remote directories at a new ISP, after I almost installed a Midnight-Commander style console app. Krusader's plit-view Synchronization is really comprehensive and well done.