Tumbler is a D-Bus service that generates thumbnails for various kinds of applications. Clients can pick from several schedulers and thumbnail flavors depending on their needs. Tumbler provides a plugin interface via which the list of supported file types can be extended. It already ships thumbnail plugins for videos, fonts, images, ODF documents, PDF/PS documents and RAW images. Thanks to its support for delegating thumbnail request to specialized third-party services, Tumbler can also be used with closed source thumbnail generators.

Originally written for Xfce and its Thunar file manager, Tumbler was later integrated in MeeGo and is now used on the N9 as well. In this talk, I will explain the features, design, and usage of Tumbler as well as its current limitations. The ultimate goal is to make application and desktop developers aware of it and motivate them to adopt Tumbler in their software. The talk will include a live demonstration.