Refresh thumbnails in nautilus

Updated for 14.04 LTS (or later)

From 12.10 onward, thumbnails are stored at ~/.cache/thumbnails

Corrected commands:

rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails

Then either restart, or:

killall nautilus

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Original answer: (for 12.04, and earlier)

Here the commands:

rm -r  ~/.thumbnails
killall nautilus

easier way just delete the failed to cache icons by deleting the following directory.

It will make nautilus to refresh only those thumbnails which currently have folder like thumbnail. It will not help if you want to refresh for file/folder which currently have any thumbnail.

Most of the time you should delete this then deleting all the thumbnails.

~/.thumbnails/fail

There is a hidden directory in your home called .thumbnails.

If you delete a file (or all) there, its thumbnail will be recreated by nautilus the next time that you visit the dir where it's stored.

I don't know if there is some more convenient way.

Edit: Nautilus will store the thumbnails in memory. You will need to close and start again Nautilus to force it to recreate them.