OTA-6 will include the new thumbnailer service

Aug 19, 2015 21:05 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Michi Henning wrote a very interesting article on his blog, where he explains in detail how he, James Henstridge and Xavi Garcia Mena managed to implement a fast and scalable thumbnailing service for both Ubuntu Linux and Ubuntu Touch operating systems.

The need for a fast and scalable thumbnailing service for Canonical's desktop and mobile operating system came as a necessity that all applications required to display image thumbnails for multiple multimedia elements, including video and audio streams, as well as images. The thumbnail creation process is known to consume a lot of CPU resources, as well as bandwidth if the respective multimedia files are to be fetched over the network.

In order to improve the overall performance of the system, no matter if you're using Ubuntu on your mobile phone, laptop, or desktop computer, as well as to avoid usage of different APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that might turn out to be non-trivial to learn, the need for a very fast and scalable thumbnailer was one of the main challenges for Ubuntu developers.

"Over the past few months, James Henstridge, Xavi Garcia Mena, and I have implemented a fast and scalable thumbnailing service for Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch," says Michi Henning. "It makes sense to provide thumbnail creation as a platform API that hides this complexity from application developers and, to improve performance, to cache thumbnails on disk."

The fast thumbnailer will be implemented in Ubuntu 15.10

Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), which is currently in development, will be the first version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system to get the extremely fast and scalable thumbnailer. On the other hand, the new thumbnailer will arrive in Ubuntu Touch as part of the anticipated OTA-6 software update. The entire development process for Ubuntu's next-gen thumbnailer service is explained in detail on Mr. Henning blog post.