(Click to enlarge)

I'm not sure if I'm understanding fully.

Is it the images themselves (thumbs) taking a while to load on the page... or is it the actual theme image entry boxes taking a while to load / appear in the drop downs?

If the clickable box loads quickly, then I don't think it's a big deal the image / thumb itself takes a while. There's no harm early-clicking something aside from the higher possibility you'd click the wrong thing. But I think the idea of allowing users to interact on a page as soon as possible (a web standard that affects SEO rankings) trumps that caveat.

If the boxes themselves are taking a while to load and therefore you physically cannot click to edit said theme image until it loads, that's definitely a problem.

OK when you load up this page it shows what I see above however when you click to view the images its still in process loading the complete page of images to edit. I want to say the page loads correctly but all the images are creating a lag in loading I would say about 30 seconds to 45 seconds before you can even click to view the section of images. Hope this helps clarify.

Okay, I think I understand. It sounds like there may be an issue with JavaScript; because the images are taking so long to load, some JavaScript is being deferred until after the images load, thus probably why you can't click anything yet. I'll look into it.

Check https://gitlab.com/composr-foundation/composr/-/commit/7814c91fd787b1d32b7e9154eb79c2710eadca1c

I added lazy loading to the theme images. There's really no reason to load all of the images right away, plus it was delaying the deferred JavaScript by doing so. This should speed things up significantly. Please let me know if it works.