Update on sloooow image loading?

When I click to load, images (photos, screenshots, etc. ) they can take 20 or more seconds to open, whether on external, cloud or internal drive. Once open, they behave normally.
Previous posts were two or three years old and didn't deal with my type of setup: Win 10 21H2 (19044), Radeon RX Vega M GH Graphics (current driver) on Intel NUC.
This slowness does not appear in any other activity, I can play games, open large documents, etc.
Any thoughts would be most welcome.

Witch program or app is the default to open or load, images (photos, screenshots, etc. )?

Good suggestion. The slow loading is with the native Windows 10 internal program. When I left click a photo (or other image), an hourglass appears for about 20 seconds or so. During that time I can not do anything with the photo. Once the hourglass disappears, I can handle the image--and other images in that folder--normally. It's as though something is loading in the background and once it is loaded things run normally.

Kupuna said:

When I left click a photo (or other image), an hourglass appears for about 20 seconds or so. During that time I can not do anything with the photo. Once the hourglass disappears, I can handle the image--and other images in that folder--normally. It's as though something is loading in the background and once it is loaded things run normally.

It can be the antivirus scanning the files. What antivirus you have? Do you have more than one?

Lets do the basic

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say your disk is in use and ask if you want to schedule to next start = yes
Restart
Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc

Back to Windows, open a CMD window as administrator and type:
sfc /scannow

If it finds any corrupted files, fixing or not, reboot and run again

Thank you Megahertz. The chkdsk routine fixed the problem. The reboot was so fast that I couldn't catch any report of where the problem was, but photos are opening correctly.

It can be that was a logical disk issue.
Is it a HDD or a SSD?
To view the check disk results
Read Chkdsk Log in Event Viewer in Windows 10