This paper describes a general way how to permanently store image thumbnails. Those thumbnails are often used in image cataloging programs, file managers, graphic programs and many other kind of applications. Unfortunately there is no widely used standard for handling and saving scaled down preview versions of a file. This leads to the current situation where several thumbnails exist for every single file on the users hard disk. These can mostly only be used by the program which generated them.
The purpose of this document is to provide a general method for this task and enable different programs to share their generated thumbnails as much as possible.
The described handling can be integrated into helper libraries which make this process completely transparent to a single application (eg. it could be integrated into the base libraries of GNOME and KDE).
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