Nautilus - deleting thumbnail files

[louis_b]

I'm running RH7.2 with Gnome. My disk space under / has been constantly shrinking without adding new files. After a bit of searching, I find that Nautilus has created hundreds of directories and thousands of thumbnail files under ~/.nautilus/thumbnails/, totalling 478 MB in size (about 30,000 files).

Is it safe to delete the directories and files under ~/.nautilus/thumbnails? I did search this forum and google and couldn't find any reference to getting rid of the thumbnails.

The format of the directory names is also a bit strange, for example:

~/.nautilus/thumbnails/file:%2F%2F%2Fhome%2Flouis%2Fap021028_files/

In this directory, there would be many .png files, which I presume are the thumbnails.

I don't want to break Nautilus so I thought I'd ask first.

Thanks for the help.

[louis_b]

I went ahead and deleted the bulk of the thumbnails without any deleterious effects on Nautilus and gained 400 + MB of disk space.

Nautilus creates large thumbnail files (16kb each) and doesn't keep track of deleted files or deleted directories. So, unless you need the thumbnails, you can turn off the thumbnails in the Prerfences-Speed Tradeoffs menu.