What's the latest version that doesn't lag the system when lots of images are opened?

[Elliandr]

I've been using ImageGlass for many years. On my old computer I would happily use ImageGlass to open lots of lots of images at one time without any issues. I don't remember what that version was, but I do remember that it didn't support .webp if that helps.

After that computer's CPU and GPU died due to water cooling failure it was cheaper to upgrade to something twice as powerful than to replace those specific parts. Most other hardware is the same and I tried to install what I had before and do things as before.

However, the version of ImageGlass I have is, well, not great. It has lots of problems which the old version didn't have.

1.) In the old version that I am familiar with, pressing the arrow on the keyboard would cycle images without issue. While the new version also does that, if any files are added to the folder pressing the arrow keys back and forth takes you to a completely different file as if ImageGlass not points to a position within a folder rather to the specific file name. This is a big problem for someone who works with lots of images and needs to compare images rapidly. (My use case is non-commercial, I just like working with images.)

2.) In the old version, right-clicking an image can be used to copy and image to a new location. In the new version it does that, but again, if the contents of the folder have changed what is copied is not the same image. Furthermore, each image copied adds to the clipboard together so when I paste windows asks if I want to replace the file which slows down workflow.

3.) In the current version if I update graphics drivers all the instances show a red X and need to be manually re-opened. They also shift to a different monitor for some reason. The old version did this as well, but the problem is that since right-clicking to open the image location doesn't actually work when the folder contents have changed it can take quite a long time to recover.

4.) More importantly, the old version was truly lightweight. I could have hundreds of images open without any slow down. Now? Well, I have suffered some very very serious system instabilities as a result of opening just over 100 images. Looking at the task manager, the CPU and memory usage doesn't increase very much, but it caused lagging mouse movement which is a problem. I also lost allot of work from last night because my computer can't recover from hibernate with so many images open in Image Glass.

I just tested it again. I opened 100 of the same tiny image - 96.9 kb in size - on one monitor. After the 100th image opened there was a 3 second lag in opening any new images. That's around where the problems start. However, looking at the task manager, CPU usage only increased to 12% with memory at 22%. After closing all but one instance the CPU usage fell to 1% while the memory usage fell to 11%.

If we round up to 100 kb, the total memory used for the images should be around 10 MB, but it used 11% of 64 GB of RAM to open them. Rounding down to 10% would be 6.4 GB of RAM to load 10 MB of image data. While I understand that a program needs overhead to run, the point is that the old version I am familiar with did not have these problems. Furthermore, even with this increased usage of system resources, it still shouldn't cause this much lag at just 6.4 GB of RAM usage. I am still at less than half when fully utilizing ImageGlass.

I don't need lots of bells and whistles. What I need is to open images full screen without a UI taking screen space, be able to use arrows to cycle between images, and leave hundreds of images up without affecting system performance. A dark mode is "nice to have" as would a feature to re-open all images to their correct windows after a crash or to be able to reload images that need to be redrawn all at once, but that's not necessary. The vast majority of the bells and whistles added over the years are not important to me. Even support for webp isn't that useful to me since I hate that format and avoid it where possible or convert to png when not possible. Oh yeah, and having it not nag me to update would obviously be a plus.

My current system specs:

Processor: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K 3.60 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
Installed RAM: 64 GB DDR4 (63.8 GB usable)
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Version 22HN2.

To emphasize what my computer is capable of while not using image glass, I can run a dozen instances of Media Player Classic at once without slowdown while rendering a video in vegas studios while running an emulation PS3 game at full speed. All without any slowdown. Yet 100 images is too much now?

Any suggestions? I'd really prefer rolling back to the last known good version of Image Glass without these issues. I can see in some logs that some versions had notes of worsening memory management to accommodate new features that I don't need, but don't really know where all that started. It's probably too much to ask that any of these problems be fixed in future versions since it's fairly obvious that the many features added over the years do not cater to me personally, but some of these old versions have scary warnings of vulnerabilities related to remote access features I really don't want in an image viewer so I figured I should ask for advice on where to go.

Thanks.