Repeated Thumbnails - using one per file when many of the thumbnails are identical

[Doragon-S]

Problem:
There is a thumbnail saved for every single file (I am using here music files).
Every song in the album (in my case, and I'm presuming the majority of cases) use the same thumbnail.
This takes up many times the required storage, and can become more of an issue with larger libraries.

Solution:
The thumbnails were pulled (presumably) from the files themselves. (I didn't provide any thumbnails)
So instead of having a separate thumbnail file to reference, use the ones saved in the files themselves.

Alternative (worse) solution:
Instead of one thumbnail per file, (that has one)
Files with the same thumbnail should both refer to that thumbnail.
Problems with alternative:
certain cases might have different artwork for every song, so we can't assume the artwork. We'd need some sort of AI image recognition to calculate, which is WAY overcomplicated.

[TrigamDev]

This takes up many times the required storage, and can become more of an issue with larger libraries.

With how small thumbnails are (each is at max 256x256 and stored as a .webp, which is pretty space efficient), thumbnails shouldn't be much of a concern for storage space, at least compared to the actual content of the library. For my library of over 1 GB of images, the thumbs folder is under 10 MB.

So instead of having a separate thumbnail file to reference, use the ones saved in the files themselves.

This wouldn't work well, as the thumbnails generated are primarily used to keep loading times low. Not generating one and instead using the one embedded in the file would result in each one having to load the full quality thumbnail each time, slowing down loading times.

We'd need some sort of AI image recognition to calculate, which is WAY overcomplicated.

Detecting images with identical content, especially since thumbnails are generated at identical sizes (preserving aspect ratio of course), is pretty trivial, and wouldn't at all require AI image recognition.

[Doragon-S]

For my library of over 1 GB of images, the thumbs folder is under 10 MB.
The file size seems to be ~7-10kB per file. so if you only have 1000 files, then it would only be 10MB. but as the number of files increases, this would get kind of clunky.

I wasn't thinking primarily of thumbnails for picture files, but of music or pdf, etc.
I wasn't saying to try to extract the picture out of the file and then compress it, and then display it as the thumbnail. it seems to me that there already is a "thumbnail" picture in the files, that tagstudio is extracting. (like the album art for a music file)
I would guess its part of the metadata of the file somehow.

I wouldn't think this image would be slow to extract, if it's nearly instantaneous in file explorer.

It might be a good idea anyway to leverage the metadata of the files.

[TrigamDev]

I wouldn't think this image would be slow to extract, if it's nearly instantaneous in file explorer.

It still takes time for the image to be loaded and then displayed, especially when there's a large number of these files on screen at once. The generated thumbnails are used to reduce this time as much as possible by only loading a very low quality thumbnail instead, and embedded thumbnails are very likely much higher quality than the generated thumbnails.