Previews/Caching in File Browser Mode

[jswag]

I have a quite large library accumulated over 20 or so years of shooting RAW and use a NAS to store probably on the order of 15 TB of photos. I'm hoping to switch from Lightroom, but using Photomator is downright painful in the new File browser mode, which I've been anticipating for so long. My NAS uses a pool of hard drives and is remote, but backed by a reliable gigabit connection, but Photomator seems to only keep even a small collection of thumbnails in memory/local disk at a time. Even if it generated thumbnails on the server (ie, in the directory I'm accessing the photos from) instead of constantly retrieving the full RAW file, seemingly processing it and generating a thumbnail that would help significantly. Even when looking at a directory with a few hundred photos I can watch it generate previews/thumbnails of the things on screen, then when scrolling away, and coming back, have to wait several minutes for it to regenerate those. Ultimately this leads to an experience where I'm constantly staring at gray boxes and blindly double clicking on them to try to find my photos.

Lightroom's smart previews feature is exceptionally good, allowing edits of the previews, etc. but even if I could just *browse* the images by having Photomator either generate small previews in a hidden subdirectory or cache them locally on my Mac that would be helpful. I don't even need to edit before the full render, just be able to navigate. At this junction switching to Photomator would seem to require me to invest in a pile of high capacity SSDs just to browse my library. .