# General Options

This section describes the options presented under the General Tab of the preferences dialog.

## Thumbnails

Size

- Selects the size of the thumbnails displayed throughout Geeqie, dimensions are width by height in pixels.

Quality

- Selects the method to use when scaling an image down for thumbnails:

  Nearest

- Fastest scaler, but results in poor thumbnail quality.

Tiles

- Thumbnail results are very close to bilinear, with better speed.

Bilinear

- High quality results, moderately fast.

Cache thumbnails and sim. files

- Enable this to save thumbnails and sim. files to disk. Subsequent requests for a thumbnail will be faster, as will searches and find duplicates.

  Use Geeqie thumbnail style and cache

- Thumbnails are stored in a folder hierarchy that mirrors the location of the source images. Thumbnails have the same name as the original appended by the file extension .png.

  The root of the hierarchy is:

  `$XDG_CACHE_HOME/geeqie/thumbnails/` or, if $XDG_CACHE_HOME is not defined: `$HOME/.cache/geeqie/thumbnails/`

Store thumbnails local to image folder (non-standard)

- When enabled, Geeqie attempts to store cached thumbnails closer to the source image. This way multiple users can benefit from a single cache, thereby reducing wasted disk space.

  Thumbnails have the same name as the original appended by the file extension .png.

  The resulting location is the source image's folder, in a sub folder with the name `.thumbnails`

  When the image source folder cannot be written, Geeqie falls back to saving the thumbnail in the user's home folder.

Use standard thumbnail style and cache, shared with other applications

- This will use a thumbnail caching method that is compatible with applications that use the standard thumbnail specification. When this option is enabled thumbnails will be stored in:

  `$XDG_CACHE_HOME/thumbnails/` or, if $XDG_CACHE_HOME is not defined: `$HOME/.cache/thumbnails/`

  All thumbnails are stored in the same folder, with computer-generated filenames. Refer to Thumbnails Reference for additional details.

Use EXIF thumbnails when available

- Geeqie will extract thumbnail from EXIF data if available, instead of generating one. This will speed up thumbnails generation, but the EXIF thumbnail may be not in sync with the image if it was modified by a tool which did not also update the thumbnail data.

Thumbnail color management

- Where possible store thumbnails with an sRGB color profile.

  Selecting this option will increase the time taken to generate thumbnails.

  You probably will want to deselect the "Use EXIF thumbnails" option.

Collection preview

- If thumbnail caching is enabled and you open the Collections folder , Geeqie will display a preview of the collections as a thumbnail montage. This option limits the number of thumbnails displayed in each preview.

  ImageMagick is required for this feature.

## Star Rating

The characters used to display the Star Rating are defined here. They are defined as a hexadecimal Unicode character. The complete list of Unicode characters can be found in many places on the Internet.

## Slide show

Delay between image change

- Specifies the delay between images for slide shows, in seconds.

Random

- When enabled, slide show images will appear in random order.

  Random images are displayed such that each image appears once per cycle of all images. When the slide show repeat option is enabled, the image order is randomized after completing each cycle.

Repeat

- This will cause the slide show to loop indefinitely, it will continue with the first image after displaying the last image in the slide show list.

## Image loading and caching

Decoded image cache size

- Limit the amount of memory available for caching images.

Preload next image

- Enabling this option will cause Geeqie to read the next logical image from disk when idle, it will also retain the previously viewed image in memory. By reading the nearest images into memory, time to display the next image is reduced.

  This option will increase Geeqie memory requirements, and may cause performance issues with very large images. If the use of Geeqie results in the system noticeably swapping memory to disk, try disabling this feature.

Refresh on file change

- Geeqie will monitor currently active images and folders for changes in their modification time, and update the display if it changes.

  Disable this if the system will not go into sleep mode due to occasional disk activity from the time check, or if Geeqie updates too often for folders with continuously changing content.

## Menu style

Use a ≡ "hamburger" style menu button instead of the standard menu across the top of the frame.

Geeqie must be restarted for changes to take effect.

## Expand menu/toolbar

Expand the menu/toolbar to the full width of the window.

Geeqie must be restarted for changes to take effect.

## Hide Selectable Bars

The menu item Hide Selectable Bars will toggle display of the bars selected here. The default keystroke for this action is `control + backtick`

Geeqie must be restarted for changes to take effect.

## AppImage updates notifications

Show a notification on start-up if the server has a newer version than the current. Requires an Internet connection. Displayed only if an AppImage is being run.

## Show predefined keyword tree

Deselecting this option will hide the list of predefined keywords on the right-hand side of the keywords pane of the info sidebar.

Geeqie must be restarted for the change to take effect.

## Timezone Database

The timezone database is used to correct exif time and date for UTC offset and Daylight Saving Time as described here. This option allows you to install or update the database. An Internet connection is required.

## On-line help search

An internet search engine may be used to search the help files on Geeqie's website. The string used to conduct the search is defined here. In most cases it will be in one of two formats:

`https://www.search-engine.com/search?q=site:geeqie.org/help`

`https://www.search-engine.com/?q=site:geeqie.org/help'`