Quite confused about Nextcloud previewgenerator & thumbnails in general.

[jackdinn]

I only started looking at the previewgenerator because i needed mp4 video thumbnails. I think all i needed to do was to install ffmpeg but i ended up installing previewgenerator.

I ran

Code:

su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ preview:generate-all -vvv'

I added

Code:

su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ preview:pre-generate'

to crontab

Code:

crontab -u www -e

When i ran su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ preview:generate-all -vvv' It was doing something to all the image files that it could find. It took a few hours but it did finish.
It created a 10GB folder called preview that I'm not sure about, i mean 10GB for thumbnails? But i do have a lot of photos so maybe.

Code:

root@nextcloud:/mnt/files/appdata_ocfuu1fbyyca # du -sh preview/*
701M    preview/0
646M    preview/1
613M    preview/2
622M    preview/3
625M    preview/4
654M    preview/5
677M    preview/6
705M    preview/7
663M    preview/8
709M    preview/9
649M    preview/a
635M    preview/b
706M    preview/c
648M    preview/d
635M    preview/e
627M    preview/f

The mp4 files now do have thumbnails, but i don't see exactly what else previewgenerator is supposed to do as the thumbnails in both "photos" and "memories" still seem to load on demand. If you scroll down reasonably fast you have to wait a few seconds for the thumbnails to catch up. But this is the way it always was.

Can some one shed a little light for me, should i remove https://github.com/nextcloud/previewgenerator ? Was i not supposed to use it? Did i use it wrong? Is it working exactly as it is supposed to? Im really not sure.

I was about to remove it & remove the "preview" folder and see what happens.

I thought i would ask here first though.