XnView Software

The startup of XnView has generally been very slow for me when launched from my exFAT R: drive. I tried the different startup settings with no luck.
What I have found is that making a subfolder hidden that is full of files unrelated to xnview usage, dramatically changed the startup speed from very slow to instant; but you have "show hidden folders" in explorer or equivalent so it's still visible for other purposes.

I presume at startup XnView must scan the entire child directory tree of the parent folder of the file launched. I couldn't see how to disable that beyond what I had otherwise already disabled without luck (the usual under startup settings).

It may be xnview would benefit from some finer controls here in regards to what it prescans, including an include or exclude folder list (when encountered; so launching a file from within an excluded folder should still show it, and its tree).

XnView checks files in the same folder of the file, not parent folder
If you load a file in R:\myfolder\file.jpeg, and you have all the "problematic" files in R:\, you have again slow loading?

I'll do some experimenting and report back!

So the slowdown actually seems to be caused by some network folder shortcuts with the network not available, in the folder of the file that's launched.

I think this could be resolved by xnview skipping folder shortcuts (if that's difficult without causing a hang then all shortcuts or there could be an auto-maintained blacklist)

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