If you are running Linux Mint on a low-end system or accessing data on slow media, you might value performance over appearance. Here are some settings you can change to make Nemo load folder listings faster.
First, open the preferences window with Alt+P.
Turn off Nemo Media Columns.
Media Columns let you preview some metadata like resolution and duration in the columns in list view, and let you sort files by them.
This requires accessing every media file of a directory. In a directory with a high number of such files, this can cause a performance hit.
This can be turned off in the plugins menu.
Turn off Nemo Emblems.
Loading the emblem for each item seems to add a slight delay in large directories. You can turn it off in the plugins menu.
Turn off thumbnails.
When previewing media files isn't so important and you mainly work with file names, you can turn this off in the "Preview" menu at "Show thumbnails:".
Turn off "count number of items".
To count the number of items inside a folder, Nemo needs to access each subfolder of a folder you opened. In a folder with many subfolders, such as a folder with pages saved as "Web Page, Complete", this can cause a performance hit.
Turning it off will speed up loading directories with many subfolders but will of course not show the file counts.
(I hereby release this post into the public domain under CC0 1.0.)
How to speed up Nemo file manager [guide]
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