Despite being undocumented by the camera manufacturers, there are several Free Software tools to manipulate RAW files on Linux.

I was looking on how to provide thumbnails to RAW files in Nautilus.

I found 3 methods:

The first two method just wrap dcraw in a shell script, which is quite heavy.

The latest just take dcraw code to convert to thumbnails. It does the right thing as it extract the thumbnails from the RAW file and let GdkPixbuf convert it to the thumbnail in PNG.

I wonder why Nautilus doesn't do that for JPEG files too as most digital cameras comes with a thumbnail inside the EXIF information; falling back to the actual method if needed.