Thanks Thomas, but I did try that, and it does not change the display, still JPEG standard icons.
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In addition:
Images can successfully be copied only if not double-clicked before. In this case, the Foto-Prewiewer says “invalid format or file damaged”. Windows Explorer restarts and the phone must be reconnected to copy files again.
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KleinerAdmin : I did not meet this particular issue, but it seems awful !
That is the online link but you can email support (at) fairphone (dotcom)
Done, ticket opened.
I received an automated answer telling that I had to contact my local reseller (Orange/France), but with the possibility to ignore it by sending the invoice of the Fairphone.
Now I’m waiting for a human answer 
I will keep you in touch here
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And I thought I couldn’t find any new FP4 bug today. 
But yeah, I experience the same behavior. And it’s not caused by the Camera app. Photos taken by GCam behave the same.
So:
- all thumbnails are missing
- opening an image directly from the phone folder (DCIM) takes an enormous amount of time and sometimes doesn’t even finish
- sometimes it straight up crashes Explorer and the phone needs to be reconnected
I do wonder if either/any of the complainants have tried starting in safe mode or done a factory reset. Isn’t this likely to be an OS software issue that may not be common to all users?
I’ve just tried safe mode and I managed to crash the Windows Explorer as well. Thumbnails are also still missing. And I don’t like the idea to perform a factory reset just to see if it fixes things. For me, that would be just the last resort before sending the phone back to Fairphone. The experience with the phone is definitely not great so far.
Razem, I’m convinced that the issue can’t be fixed by a factory reset.
My FP is really new, and is in my view in “good health” (very few apps installed, for example), I’m careful with that.
I believe that it’s some kind of an Android bug, because some forums reference the same behaviour, on various phones.
For me, it’s until now the only bad experience I had with the FP4.
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Are the pictures stored on the internal storage or an SD card (hopefully formatted as external)? Maybe its just all that slow that thumbnails need ages to show up?
Internal storage. I don’t have any SD card inserted. And I only have 3 photos, so it should be pretty fast IMO.
Same for me, internal storage. no SD card.
If you contact support they a) will likely ask you to do a factory reset b) will have to do one if you sent it too them.
Hopefully someone will find an alternative.
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Hi All,
When I plug my FP4 into my laptop to look at photos, the thumbnail in the DCIM folder is the file icon rather than a small photo. Is there a way to change this ? When I copy/move the photo to the laptop the thumbnail is OK.
Thanks in advance
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Hi AliRay, moved your post to this existing
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Hi !
Just a post to tell you that I’m still in touch with Fairphone support to investigate this issue.
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I don’t have Windows, so I tested it on my GNOME Linux workstation (Fedora). Thumbnails indeed do not show up when connecting the phone via USB and browse to the SD card. But when inserting the SD card directly into my laptop, the thumbnails indeed do show up. However, I do have to enable the option that I want to see thumbnails everywhere on my computer. If I do not enable that I won’t see thumbnails on network shares and mounted drives. This is for performance reasons.
This is by the way not only a Fairphone issue. It’s probably part of AOSP. There are more topics about this online with a variety of Android phones. I suppose that Fairphone won’t spend time on this. But maybe if you pitch this feature at LineageOS, they might develop it and then Fairphone may cherry pick that change from there. The default should still be to not process thumbnails. But maybe add an option to developer options to enable them, something like that. In any case this is not a Fairphone specific issue but an Android one. I therefore will remove it from the issues list specifically about the Fairphone 4. Android feature requests are out of scope for that. If this was part of the next Android release, then we could keep it there, because then Fairphone does have influence over it, by making a new Android release available 
That’s not the case now and I think this issue is likely not resolved this decade, if ever 
I’m really not sure this can’t and shouldn’t be fixed 
I did a little deep dive and some tests since the MTP spec actually requires thumbnails to be supported…
D.2.10 GetThumb
This operation retrieves a thumbnail for an image object on the responder.
The Representative Sample object property may be used as a more flexible alternative for
devices which support object properties, but this operation must be supported for PTP-
compatibiliy.
…so this should at least be possible.
In the Dolphin filemanager (KDE Plasma/Arch) it doesn’t work for me either.
But it do get thumbnails in Windows 10…
…and if I open that same folder using Gwenview (KDE’s image viewer) it works as well:
Keep in mind that I’m running Android 12 (CalyxOS) on my FP4 and I can’t try this on a stock FP4 till tomorrow, but it at least shows that it’s possible.
I tried two other Android devices that use MTP as well and did get the same behaviour.
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Interesting. Then it’s likely a library that’s missing on my computer. Or perhaps support for the thumbnails. Thanks for the double check!
I checked with my Pixel 3 (Android 12), no thumbnails either. So I suppose the leading factor here is a file viewer/manager that uses the MTP library properly (or has the feature enabled to generate thumbnails).
I did some more tests, found some pictures that didn’t have thumbnails , put them on all the devices and tried accessing them, here are the results:
| Device connected to (Application) |
FP4 CalyxOS Android 12 |
FP4 FPOS Android 11 |
Nexus 4 Android 11 |
SM-T715 Android 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Windows 10 (Explorer) |
 |
 |
|
|
| CalyxOS as host / client (Files) |
-/- | / |
/- |
/ |
| Plasma / Arch & Ubuntu (Dolphin) |
|
|
|
|
Dolphin works now, I forgot that I had disabled thumbnails for remote places, gets anyoing with NFS shares.
The interesting part for me is that, as the OP already mentioned, pictures taken with the FPCamera app are all affected. Those won’t show thumbnails if located on a A9 - A11 device, but moved to a A12 device they work just fine.
I did find a few pictures without thumbnails on the older devices as well and those exhibit that same behaviour, but most of them show up without problems.
The older devices were also able to show thumbnails for problematic pictures located on the A12 device.
My takeaway is, this seems rooted somewhere in the MTP-stack. If I read the MTP specs correctly there are (at least) two ways to get thumbnails, either the old PTP way or with a Representative Sample, so maybe we are looking at a situation where host and client can’t negotiate a working solution that would lead to thumbnails being shown
No idea why Dolphin just works™, newer MTP-stack maybe 
Has someone tested this on Windows 11, does Explorer show thumbnails there?
GNOME’s gvfs-mtp just uses libmtp in the background, same as KDE’s kio.
The newest libmtp was released 25.09.2021, that should probably be in the latest Fedora (haven’t checked), so it seems likely Gnome Files doesn’t implement some necessary part.
You could try installing Gwenview or Dolphin, but as a GNOME user you probably don’t want to pull in half of KDE 
The Gwenview flatpak sadly didn’t show MTP devices when I tried it…
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