(Copied from original User Voice forum)
"Large image files can quickly bring Maya to it's knees by filling up main system Ram and GPU resources. But more often than not, we have no immediate need to see the full resolution of these image files inside Maya itself. Instead they are merely there to be fed to our final Render engine of choice. Be it Mental Ray, V-Ray, Arnold, etc.
In the meantime, a much lower resolution placeholder would do just as well.
In Nuke this is handled by their read nodes having a separate file path entry for a low-res Proxy version of the image(s) you are loading in. Then there are global switches which enable you to tell Nuke to either use the full-resolution files for high quality results or the low-resolution versions for speed and interactivity. Best of both worlds at the flick of a switch."
