TIL - How to Enable Video Thumbnails for SMB Share on Nixos and Nautilus

So recently I have setup a mini NAS and I connect to it via an SMB share, but on nautilus I noticed that unlike my local files for the videos it would not create thumbnails when I was using nautilus (file manager for Gnome).

The fix ended up being pretty simple ¹:

Nautilus > Preference > Show thumbnails.

Set it to "On this computer only" for only seeing thumbnails on your system, .

If u need it to do same for a remote server, select "All files"

Or since we are managing this via NixOS and want to do things declaratively we can do do the following in our Nix config ².

{
dconf.settings = {
  "org/gnome/nautilus/preferences" = {
    show-image-thumbnails = "always";
  };
};
}

That’s it, in your SMB share you should now be able to view thumbnails for all of your videos.