GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 494592
~/.thumbnails should be placed in ~/.cache
Last modified: 2012-09-26 18:38:55 UTC
According to http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html (FreeDesktop base directory specification): "$XDG_CACHE_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific non-essential data files should be stored. If $XDG_CACHE_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.cache should be used." To make things like backups easier, nautilus' gnome-video-thumbnailer should place its thumbnails somewhere in ~/.cache. This would also ease the development of automatic cleanup tools (see https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/handling-full-disks and https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/make-free-space-wizard).
There is a separate freedesktop spec for thumbnailing, and it very clearly specifies ~/.thumbnails as the shared thumbnail location: http://people.freedesktop.org/~vuntz/thumbnail-spec-cache/directory.html You would need to convince people to change the thumbnailing spec, which seems unlikely. Closing as notabug. - Mike
Happened, actually. http://specifications.freedesktop.org/thumbnail-spec/thumbnail-spec-latest.html#HISTORY May 2012, Version 0.8.0 Modified to respect the XDG Base Directory Specification
Nautilus, GTK, GLib and gnome-desktop have been updated to use that directory for 3.6.