Thumbnail load question for large files

[tomgoodell]

I've read through what I can find in the forum and the wiki but I think my situation is somewhat unique. I'm using XnView MP to view fine art images I create in Photoshop. I'm viewing them regularly in XnView as I save them at various stages. They start as TIF files created in Photoshop from DNG files. My process often ends up with very large files (several GB is common, sometimes getting up into the tens of GB). When they exceed TIF limits I go to PSB files.

XnView is slow at rendering the thumbnails on the larger files. If I view a folder and wait for the thumbnails to populate, then click away to another folder then back again, it takes a while again, though less time than the first time. I'm guessing it's reading embedded thumbnails though I'm not sure how to determine that.

I'm running:
• Windows 11 Pro on an ASUS ProArt X870E-Creator motherboard
• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X33D 4.3 Ghz 16 core CPU
• 192 GIG Kingston DDR5-5600 (4x48GB)
• MSI GeForce RTX 5080 INSPIRE 3x OC 16 TB graphics card

My working files—the ones I actually work on in Photoshop—are all on a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB Gen4 M.2 SSD. This is the drive I most frequently view in XnView.

Those are copied nightly to an 18TB Seagate Exos X24 hard drive. I also view this drive sometimes in XnView though not as often as the SSD.

TheXnView Catalog folder is on my C:\ drive, another Samsung 990 Pro 4TB Gen4 M.2 SSD.

I have nothing listed in Excluded/Included files.

I've never run any of the Maintenance tasks.

I'm wondering what might be the best configuration to get the fastest possible load of thumbnails in XnView.

I've provided screenshots that I think might be relevant to this question.