This issue is causing a lot of flamewars here - https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79943 It happens that the .thumbnails directory fills up rapidly resulting in 0 kb free space which results in unbootable system (if home is in /) and data loss... even more it's a privacy issue since people will usually not know that it makes copies of their pictures in this location (for e.g.. if someone mounted an encrypted partition and enabled thumbnail view). I would suggest the standards should change to put the thumbnails in the same directory as the pictures in the ".thumbnails" directory... IMO this should also save I/O and every other problem. Additionally the application should check how much % of free space is available before actually putting the thumbnails there.
*** Bug 38662 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
FWIW, in GNOME, we have code to make sure .thumbnails doesn't grow forever, see http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/tree/plugins/housekeeping/gsd-housekeeping-manager.c
Issue is the KDE guys don't agree with that. They say they strictly follow the standards and ain't gonna touch the .thumbnails directory cause it's used by other applications and might hinder it's working. I'll link this thread to them.
The title is misleading. A better choice would be '.thumbnails' must not grow without limit. This fits well with the intent of original spec., where .thumbnails is a cache. Cache's must be clear'ed down :-)
Sorry for the noise, reassigning to new (since 2 years) maintainers (Ryan & David).
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