There should be an option to add exceptions to the Tumbler thumbnailing. One good example is encrypted directories mounted with encfs. I don't have an encrypted home, and I don't want thumbnails to be created from the encrypted files, when they are temporarily unencrypted. Even in the case I did have an encrypted /home, thumbnailing would most probably be unwanted, since it does lose some of the extra security brought by the encryption.
If there would be a way to probe for *temporary* encrypted mounts, and disable those via a GUI option (or even xfconf, enabling this by default), it would be the best solution. Disabling thumbnailing on *all* encrypted mounts makes no sense if you have an encrypted /home too.
Another example when you'll want it: obex mounts. Bluetooth is quite slow itself, so you wouldn't want it to copy all the photos from your phone twice. In fact, my old samsung goes crazy when tumbler tries to get them.
Can you perhaps run gvfs-info --filesystem <directory in the encrypted volume> in a terminal and attach the output to this bug? I wonder whether the 'filesystem::type' or 'filesystem::use-preview' attributes can be interpreted as hints for whether we are dealing with an encrypted device or not.
Hey Jannis, as I told in my first comment, I'm using encfs to mount encrypted *directories*, and not mounting *actual* encrypted volumes. Maybe there is a difference here? Whatsoever, gvfs-info --filesystem /encrypted/dir just returns filesystem::size and filesystem::free attributes as expected(?), no filesystem type.
I would also like to see this functionality to e.g. exclude USB drives as well as SFTP directories from thumbnailing.
Closing old bugreports