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Previews & Thumbnails

goDrive generates thumbnails and cached previews for a wide range of file types.

Supported Types

Type Thumbnails Full Preview
JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF Yes Yes
RAW photos (CR2, NEF, ARW, …) Yes Cached JPEG
Video (MP4, MKV, …) Poster frame In-browser player
PDF Yes Native browser viewer
Office (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, …) Yes Cached image via LibreOffice
SVG Yes Inline
Text / Markdown No Syntax-highlighted
3D (OBJ) No In-browser viewer

Inode-stable cache

Thumbnails are keyed by inode + modification time, not filename or path. Renaming or moving a file preserves its cached thumbnails — no regeneration needed.

Warmup

After upload, all configured thumbnail sizes are generated asynchronously. The admin panel exposes a Preview Warmup job to pre-generate thumbnails for existing files.

Configuration

GODRIVE_PREVIEW_WORKERS=0   # 0 = auto (CPU count)
GODRIVE_PREVIEW_TIMEOUT=45s # per-file timeout

Toolchain

Preview generation uses:

  • libvips — fast image resizing and conversion
  • ffmpeg — video poster frames
  • poppler (pdftoppm) — PDF thumbnails
  • LibreOffice (headless) — Office document previews

All tools are included in the production Docker image.