The Linux MATE desktop environment still does not have icons in the file picker after all of this time. There is a patch to implement this in the GTK file picker, but this is a long way away from actual implementation. It is easier to get a patch implemented in the Linux kernel than it is to get one into the GKT 4 codebase. Why is this though? it is a small thing, but Windows has had this feature for a very long time. Even in Windows XP, you could choose to view either a list view or icons in the file chooser. But you can not do this in MATE or Gnome? Even though it has a nice icons view in the main Caja file manager, GTK just can not implement such a useful feature.
The Windows XP SP3 file picker is very good, it has a filmstrip mode for viewing photos. And this was in 2001.
Below is the patch for GTK to add icons to the file picker, this shows that it would not be hard to implement in the GTK code.