Music files not displaying album covers after installing Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS

Support and Help
1

Greetings and please be patient with me. I posted this very question elsewhere and have for the most part (in my opinion) been trolled. It may be that I’m just unfamiliar with protocols. Let me try again.

I explore music on my free time and collect what suits me. I almost always edit the music I keep, and the process of editing and saving tends to delete the metadata thumbnails. So I take the time to find a copy of the album cover and replace it. I’ve repeated this process thousands of times.

You can probably understand how annoying it is for me to find that the album art is not displaying on any of my music files since recently installing Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS on my NIMO N171G laptop.

I’ve researched online and cannot find any recent mention of this problem, let alone a solution.

The metadata is all still there, including the thumbnails. They just don’t display.

In Files the Preferences are set to Show Thumbnails on All Files. Changing this to either of the other two options doesn’t help.

I’ve tried deleting and replacing the artwork to no avail. Even the files I never edited and still have the original artwork are now not displaying the thumbnails.

I’ve updated via System Updater.

I’ve run update/upgrade via the terminal.

I’ve installed media codecs.

What could be the problem?


xxx:~$ apt list --installed | grep thumbnail

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

heif-thumbnailer/noble-updates,noble-security,now 1.17.6-1ubuntu4.1 amd64 [installed,automatic]

xxx:~$ systemctl --user list-units | grep tracker
  tracker-miner-fs-3.service                                                              loaded active running   Tracker file system data miner

@rubi1200 Thank you for your attention. The media player I’ve installed is VLC, and the thumbnails DO show up in it. It’s in the default file system that the thumbnails fail to load. The music files I have are mostly .mp3, but there’s also some .wma and .ogg files in the collection.

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2

Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

Sorry to hear you had some less than pleasant experiences. Hopefully, we can help you get this sorted out.

My basic understanding is that this is not a media format issue but rather with how Nautilus handles thumbnails in general in recent versions.

I do not have time to test this right now, but let’s first gather some information to get the ball rolling.

Open a terminal and run these command and post the output back here.

When copying the output add it to your reply, then highlight and click on </> in the composer to add code tags (preformatted text).

apt list --installed | grep thumbnail #check to see if the right thumbnailer helpers are installed

systemctl --user list-units | grep tracker #checks which tracker services are running

More info needed: which media format are you using, MP4 something else?

Which media player are you using on Ubuntu?

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3

Just an FYI, but this site is a forum, where answers are made via a reply [in a thread], and not by editing your initial post.

Ask Ubuntu in contrast is a Q&A site (not a forum), and thus requires you to amend your initial question, as replies on a Q&A site are to details in the original question. Q&A doesn’t have the concept of threads.

A prior question on AskUbuntu that appears to be yours is https://askubuntu.com/questions/1555934/music-files-not-displaying-album-art as whilst both sites can be used for support purposes; they do work somewhat differently. This site follows forum conventions.

Welcome.

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4 
xxxx:~$ apt list --installed | grep thumbnail

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

heif-thumbnailer/noble-updates,noble-security,now 1.17.6-1ubuntu4.1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
xxxx:~$ systemctl --user list-units | grep tracker
  tracker-miner-fs-3.service                                                              loaded active running   Tracker file system data miner

Thank you for your attention. The media player I’ve installed is VLC, and the thumbnails DO show up in it. It’s in the default file system that the thumbnails fail to load. The music files I have are mostly .mp3, but there’s also some .wma and .ogg files in the collection.

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6

take a look at

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1368910/how-to-create-custom-thumbnailers-for-nautilus-nemo-and-caja

and scroll down to " Thumbnailing issues", there are plenty of tips and what to look for when debugging a broken thumbnailer …

(I believe nautilus uses the “totem” thumbnailer for its backend to create thumbnails for mp3’s, make sure you have the totem package and gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad installed (you can check which thumbnailer is used for a format like mp3 with grep mp3 /usr/share/thumbnailers/*)

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7

Thanks ogra. That was a bit much for me to fully grasp, but I did pursue the suggestions one by one. It seems that my thumbnailer is sandboxed:


 xxx:~$ G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all NAUTILUS_DEBUG=Window nautilus . . . `--bind /home/jorge/.cache/gnome-desktop-thumbnailer/gstreamer-1.0`
8

I have some great news and some not so great news.

It’s not so great that I was not able to learn what exactly was the problem with the thumbnailer, assuming the problem was with the thumbnailer. I tried installing a different thumnbailer, among other things, to no avail.

The great news, for me anyway, is that I was able to solve my problem by upgrading to 25.04.

Thank you all for taking the time to read my post and offering suggestions. Please accept my apologies for not being able to help solve the issue.

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