I have 15K photos in 50 subfolders. Some of the photos are rated 5 stars. I wanted to sort the photos in descending order of ratings, but getting the sort info at the start is quite slow, and it is barely using any of my compute power to speed up the process.
"Slow" is relative, so it's hard to make any suggestions based on the information we have. If it takes 2 minutes to sort that many images, that might be as fast as it is able to perform the sort. If it takes 2 hours, there might be something wrong.
Additionally, the first time files get sorted is going to be slower than subsequent times, as data gets added to the sort cache to speed up subsequent sorts. You may want to double-check your Cache settings and make sure that it is not set to remove entries older than a certain number of days (For example, if you have it set to remove sort cache entries after 1 day, but you are re-visiting the same folder 2 days later, the Sort Cache doesn't get the benefit it otherwise would have, because the entries for the files you are browsing have been cleared out and need to be built again.
On a separate note, is there any keyboard shortcut to copy image to clipboard? The current copy interface is way too clunky / takes too many clicks for me to simply copy to clipboard.
There is not. Is there a typical place where you want to paste an image after you'd copy it to the clipboard? For example, are you pasting it into an email, into a subfolder of where the image currently is, etc? While there is not currently a shortcut for copying the image the clipboard, I may be able to offer a suggestion for a more efficient way to achieve the end goal.
