Since Showtime replaced Totem as the default video player of GNOME, the desktop has lacked thumbnail capabilities for audio and video files. But to address that defect, the Rust-based gst-thumbnailers project has been in development to leverage GStreamer and paired with Rust to provide safe thumbnail generation capabilities for audio and video content.

This past week marked the release of gst-thumbnailers 1.0 Alpha 1 as the inaugural tagged release for this audio/video thumbnailer. Development on this audio/video thumbnailer for GNOME has been led by Sophie Herold.

This gst-thumbnailers is intended to replace the defunct totem-video-thumbnailer that was part of the Totem video player. Many Linux distributions still end up shipping totem-video-thumbnailer but now there is a proposal to formally adopt gst-thumbnailers. If this is done for the current GNOME 50 cycle it could lead Linux distributions to adopting this package in 2026 for modern thumbnail generation of audio/video files on the GNOME desktop.

The gst-video-thumbnailer component checks for any covert art from the video file and will otherwise check several video frames and pull the frame with the largest variance for use as the file’s thumbnail. The gst-audio-thumbnailer will look for any cover art as part of the audio file.