[exogen]

I don't find reads to be very fast either. I have a lot of photos on my network drive, and opening or previewing them feels like I'm on dial-up or worse. On Windows, scrolling the folder in thumbnail mode renders them pretty smoothly on-demand, while macOS takes ages. Even just trying to open a single JPG from the network often takes 5-10 seconds. I can't even imagine why. I noticed that if I split up the folder into smaller batches and browse those subfolders instead, it's better.

A few months ago I also painstakingly went through and added tags and comments to many of these files. Later, when the network drive was remounted, the comments were all wiped out while the tags remained (presumably, because of the different attribute storage mechanisms the different fields use, combined with the changing mount ID). Maybe that's recoverable somehow, but I simply don't have the patience. To me, it's as good as lost. Thanks, macOS!