# 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.

  Hyper

    Slowest scaler, sometimes gives better results than bilinear.

Cache thumbnails

  Enable this to save thumbnails to disk. Subsequent requests for a thumbnail will be faster.

  Use Geeqie thumbnail style and cache

    Thumbnails are stored in a folder hierachy 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 hierachy 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.

## 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.

## Info Sidebar component heights

The heights of the following components can be set individually:

- Keywords
- Title
- Comments

Geeqie must be restarted for changes to take effect.

## 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'