Comment 21 for bug 1069843

I had the same problem on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, after some package updates (maybe from 12.10 or 13.04):
Thumbnail preview is broken, CPU load increases with the number of previewable files in the folder viewed with nautilus.
Just found a solution/workaround here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=683394#15
ln -s ~/.thumbnails ~/.cache/thumbnails