Hey, thanks for the report. This is likely related to a known webview initialization overhead in Cursor compared to vanilla VS Code. The image preview uses a webview under the hood, and Cursor’s additional services can add latency to that.
A couple of things to try for diagnostics:
Launch Cursor from terminal with cursor --disable-extensions and check if image preview speed improves. This helps rule out extension interference.
Also try opening a plain .png or .jpg to see if the delay is format-specific or happens with all images.
The team is aware of webview loading performance differences. Your report helps with visibility on this. Let me know how the test goes.