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Saturday, July 7, 2012

vinetto and ubuntu

Vinetto is an open source software for viewing/extracting thumbnail information from Thumbs.db files. It is listed in the ubuntu repository and installing it from Ubuntu Software Centre is as easy as installing an application from the Apple App Store (or Google Play Store), meaning it requires no knowledge of linux! So far so good!

However out of the box, vinetto seems to have an issue running on certain types of Thumbs.db files (which it calls Type 1a files). For certain Thumbs.db files, you  may encounter an error that halts on line 338 of vinetto at im.split(). It seems to originate from the python imaging library (PIL) complaining about a null image object. This is using vinetto 0.07 and all the latest libraries, PIL 1.1.7 and Python 2.7 with ubuntu 11.04. The problem stems from a bug in PIL which does not load the image file on demand (as it should) when operation are performed on the image. The fix involves explicitly calling the load() function. We will need to edit vinetto's source and compile/install it. Since its a small python script, there isn't much of a compilation process (phew!). Download the vinetto source from here.

On line 338 (of file vinetto), you should see the im.split() function being called. You will need to insert an additional line here and add the line im.load(), so it looks like this:


This should fix the PIL error. Now re-install using the procedure mentioned in the vinetto INSTALL file.

This did solve the crash issue for the problematic Thumbs.db files, but for those files vinetto's extracted thumbnails were in the negative (inverted). Another few lines of code had to be added to fix this and the final edited file can be downloaded here.

I would be interested to know if anyone else has encountered similar issues. There is another unrelated issue, which has to do with Windows 7 generated Thumbs.db files. This I have documented in another post here.

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