Right. The native UE saving system in BPs is very undercooked. Almost raw and featureless. Hence this stuff gets to shine.
Say you want to display 5 thumbnails from 5 different save files, you’d still have to load all 5, right?
If I had some huuuge Save Games or too many small SGs to count, I’d create another dedicated SG that contains the data about all other SGs. Think a save game for save games! It contains only the information we want to present to the user, but not the game state data itself.
In a scenario where the player has 250 autosaves, we don’t want to load 250x5MBs to extract the time they last played. Instead, load that 1 tiny dedicated SG and show its content to the player. Once they’re happy with their selection, load the real 5MB thing.
On top of that, look into soft references:
Maybe there’s no need to load all 250 thumbnail assets unless the user does scroll to the bottom of the list.
Would that work for you?