Cover Thumbnailer - How to install in Ubuntu Linux

January 17, 2011
Cover Thumbnailer is a small Python script which displays music/video album covers in Nautilus in place of ordinary icons of folders, preview of pictures in a folder and more.

It is similar to what you see in Microsoft Windows 7 where the folder shows a preview of the pictures contained in it.

How to install Cover Thumbnailer in Ubuntu

This is for Ubuntu users running v 9.10 Karmic, v 10.04 Lucid and v 10.10 Maverick .

Open your terminal and enter the following set of commands :

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flozz/flozz
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install cover-thumbnailer

Once Cover Thumbnailer has been installed, you will have to restart Nautilus by running the following command.

$ nautilus -q

Now the specified folders containing music files will display the respective album cover / mosaic of covers.

If you are using another Linux distribution, you can download the source code from the Cover Thumbnailer website, compile it, and install it on your machine.

How it works

Cover Thumbnailer program will store a cache of cropped images of albums in a  hidden folder named .thumbnails/ in your home directory. The .thumbnails/ directory is a cache directory created by GNOME when you browse through your folders in Nautilus. It contains thumbnail pictures of images you have previously viewed.

And when you visit a particular music folder, the thumbnail of the respective album is shown on top of the folder.

You can access the Cover Thumbnailer preferences via GNOME Menu > System > Preferences > Cover Thumbnailer. Here you can specify more folders that can avail of Cover Thumbnailer's services and set many other options such as clearing the thumbnail cache and more.

Cover Thumbnailer Options
Cover Thumbnailer Options

Here is how the folders looks after you install cover thumbnailer program in Ubuntu.

Cover Thumbnailer
Cover Thumbnailer in action in Nautilus