I have a large folder of pdfs. Every time I open it with files it has to load these little preview icons which takes pretty much time. How can I disable this?
Pantheon-files uses a thumbnailer daemon called tumbler . You can disable generation of thumbnails for PDFs by opening a terminal and editing the config file.
sudo nano /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc
Search for the section listed below-
# PDF/PS thumbnailer
[PopplerThumbnailer]
Disabled=false
Priority=1
Locations=
MaxFileSize=0
Change Disabled=false to Disabled=true (Ctrl+O,Enter to save the file, Ctrl+X to exit nano)
Then reset your thumbnail cache with rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails
Note: Rather than disabling thumbnails for all PDFs, you could set the Locations or MaxFileSize options to your liking. Unfortunately though, as far as I can tell the Locations setting only allows you to whitelist rather than blacklist folders.
Files also uses evince-thumbnailer. Need to disable both [PopplerThumbnailer] and [DesktopThumbnailer] from /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc for disable pdf's. But it's disables more than just pdf's. To be specific, all thumbnailers under /usr/share/thumbnailers/ directory.
[DesktopThumbnailer]
Disabled=true
Priority=1
Locations=
MaxFileSize=0
Or maybe you can try:
Erase application/pdf from /usr/share/thumbnailers/evince.thumbnailer MimeType key.
