Geeqie users: how can I ignore other images in folder?

Question

Each of my pictures has a descriptive name, and that is how I find my images among hundreds of thousands (I have been a photographer since 2001).

I have folders with tens of thousands of images on a Linux system. If I choose one, say "ThisFile.jpg", and ask geeqie to open it with geeqie /folder/ThisFile.jpg, geeqie takes several seconds to open it. It seems it tries to sort the images in /folder and/or make thumbnails of the images there, things that I did not ask it to do and don't know how to disable (man page?). Of course, I can make a symlink somewhere and open the symlink, but with many pictures that is annoying. And if I pass 2 images, it opens a thumb popup window... that I did not request.

I am a long time gqview user, the predecessor of geeqie, and I made my own patches for it to work exactly the way I wanted (e.g., disabling sorting). But after so many years (last devel version from 2006!) some incompatibilities have appeared. It still works, certainly much better than geeqie because of the above, but still. I would like to move to geeqie if I can sort out the above problems (among others). Otherwise I would need to patch it as I did with gqview.

What I am missing?