But if advice

[Kurgen]

just wondered, why are the images High Res, i thought Ebays photos by todays standards arent that higher resolution. are you filling folders up with 1000s of picture taken at the cameras highest resolution, when they should be lowered, or bulk down sampled for ebay

 

[andy o]

You probably fixed it already. Just in case though.

You could use powershell to automate creation of sub folders and moving files into them.
I would not though.
5000 files isn't that many. It's not sheer number of files. NTFS can handle hundreds of thousands of files.
If you have no shell extensions on windows explorer then it is almost certainly your thumbnails.
Disable that entirely.
Stick to explorer list view and text only.

I definitely would not use the bonus tip advice in that link and install a PC maintenance tool.
I agree with Kurgen in that it sounds like you've got very big hi res pictures when you need smaller lower res for ebay.
Maybe there's another reason you want hi res pics but I'd suggest keep those big ones on an external drive.
Or 2
Always 2 copies of anything you really care about.
Preferably 3.

I dunno about ebay and external links.
Could you use linked files there?
If so I'd also consider putting the pictures on imgur or some such.
You get another back up for free.

I like imgur:

https://i.imgur.com/gyPnD5O.jpg

 

[Tetras]

1863GB Seagate ST2000DM006-2DM164 (SATA ) 22 °C
232GB Hitachi HFS250G32TND-N1A0A (SATA (SSD)) 21 °C

I would consider getting an M.2 drive as Alec suggested, your board supports PCI-E 3.0 and if task manager (or other monitoring software) proves it is the bottleneck, it might help for your specific use case of loading the thumbnails faster. They're fairly cheap at the moment and if it doesn't work, then you could re-use the storage in future. A 1TB SN570 is 56.99 at OCUK, though PCI-E 4.0 drives should be backwards compatible (the SN770 datasheet says it is). A higher-end drive with DRAM would be something like the P5P, but that's almost double the price of the SN570.