Comment 7 for bug 255030

It's not about "paranoia" Mike: it's that a user who has explicitly stated that they don't want thumbnails, ever; in the only place they *can* specify that preference, is given the impression that their decision is being ignored. I don't think you can blame them for considering it to be a bug.

eog certainly does not have the "right" to ignore user instructions, and especially not in a case like this where it has noticeable negative impacts (slow startup times in extreme cases, disk thrash, and so on) and provides no benefit at all to those users (or indeed to *any* user by default IIRC, because thumbnail display isn't even enabled).

Deleting the thumbnails after the fact doesn't address any of those issues (and in fact makes them worse, since eog will then re-thrash).
A better option is to just symlink ~/.thumbnails to /dev/null, but that obviously means that if you ever do actually want a thumbnail for some reason, you can't have it.

This particular bug seems to be filed repeatedly in every distro, but nobody will take ownership of it. Whether the bug is that eog doesn't have its own setting or it doesn't honor Nautilus's is for them to decide, but failing to address it by either approach for 8? years now is ridiculous.

Felix said in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633292 that the thumbnails were "necessary". Since he's the eog maintainer it seems unlikely GNOME will ever fix this bug, though that claim is perhaps a little misleading: the only thing that "needs" thumbnails is the "image collection" pane, and imposing this overhead regardless of whether someone actually uses that feature or not seems completely unjustified to me.

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[snipped a bunch of performance numbers]

To sum up, the CPU overhead of thumbnails is meaninglessly-small, especially since eog is keypress/timer driven anyway. Between JPEG decoding, image resizing, etc, generating a 128x128 PNG from a pixbuf is barely a blip.
The IO overhead of thumbnails OTOH can be quite significant, and warrants "fixing" (ie "honoring user preference") for the annoyance factor alone, especially since the current behavior is "wrong" anyway for the defaults eog/ubuntu uses.

[snipped discussion of some other eog bugs i noticed along the way: they're noted in the patch]

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patch is against eog-2.32.1 (15 Nov 2010), which is the current stable, though lucid is still using 2.32.0

hopefully it'll save someone some time/frustration even if it never gets merged upstream.