Thumbnailer stopped working, and I couldn't force it to restart

[o-alquimista]

I just had this problem in which thumbnails would no longer be displayed — even the cached ones. I wanted to, somehow, kill it, clear its cache and force it to restart. But honestly, I don't know exactly how it works.

1. First thing I did is I killed all running io.elementary.files instances and reopened it, but the thumbnails were still not loading.
2. Then I deleted everything inside ~/.cache/thumbnails and restarted Files, but no change.

I couldn't find any running process (from ps) or service (from systemctl status) corresponding to a thumbnailer. What did I miss?

What eventually fixed it is a log out. It only broke during that session. I'll file an issue if it happens again, but I wish I knew a quick workaround.

[jeremypw]

You should have the system service tumblerd running in the background to provide thumbnails to Files so check this is running (or starts when Files is opened and requests thumbnails) using Monitor or otherwise. You might check the app menu in Files to make sure that the "Local Thumbnails"and/or "Remote Thumbnails" option is on.

[o-alquimista]

Found it. Thanks.

$ sudo ps aux | grep tumblerd
dsilva      7820  0.1  0.4 1868292 71156 ?       SNLsl 11:02   0:00 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/tumbler-1/tumblerd