Fixing Image Thumbnails Not Showing Up in GNOME Files on Fedora Linux
A small glitch but not a good look for Fedora Linux—pun intended. After upgrading to Fedora 43, I noticed that image thumbnails disappeared from the Nautilus file manager. It wasn’t just modern formats like WebP or AVIF; even standard formats such as PNG and JPEG showed no previews. Interestingly, video files, PDFs, and EPUBs still displayed thumbnails correctly.
The behavior was inconsistent: some older images still had thumbnails, presumably cached before upgrading from Fedora 42. This made me suspect that the problem was related to thumbnail cache or file indexing during the upgrade.
The One-Line Fix
I solved the issue and restored image previews in the file explorer with a single command line.
If you are dealing with the same problem on Fedora, use that command and move on. For those curious to understand, the fix reveals why the issue appeared and what the command corrected.
Why It Happened
I searched through Fedora forums—always a good place to check for such issues. Many users suggested clearing the thumbnail cache and restarting Nautilus. My instinct told me that would be useless, and indeed, clearing the cache only caused a complete loss of image previews.
Key Insight
The glitch stemmed from thumbnailing services not refreshing properly after the system upgrade, and a targeted command restarted or reconfigured that service effectively.
Author’s summary: After upgrading Fedora 43, image thumbnails vanished in GNOME Files; the issue stemmed from an outdated thumbnailing service, fixed swiftly with a single terminal command.