Really Microsoft? This is the best you can do with FTP servers in Windows?

[justaprogressive]

2. It's the ftp protocol causing your problem

Edge can only get a directory listing...and maybe read a text file...

There is no way to do this with FTP. For any program to see the image (not just windows) it must download the entire image then render it. When you see thumbnails on a website or in windows there is a second scaled down copy hiding somewhere (you can just see the path on a normal web page if you view the source, for windows it is inside that thumbs.db (the finename stands for Thumbnail Database ))

but
I'd try the function Data communication -> Protocols -> FTP -> FTP Get Buffer. It appears to grab a single file and put it in RAM.
You can also try the information in this document:

https://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361R-01/lvconcepts/using_datasocket_technology/
to use datasockets to access FTP files.

HTH!