Taking forever to open a folder in chrome to upload a pic

[Maturin]

4g ram

This can be a bit few, depending on what else you're running at the same time, like a large desktop environment like KDE for example, some large software suite like LibreOffice, a browser with lots of tabs open, et al.
This would mean, your machine slows down because it simply runs out of RAM. It's swapping all time.

But as drhowarddrfine said:

You haven't really shown us anything. Show us the output of top during this problem.

Without knowing anything - how much RAM you have, how much swap, how much of it is used for what, how much load your machine is dealing with, then perhaps looking at other things, maybe even storage drives are almost full (depending on the filesystem storage above 60...80% capacity can become really slow),... - there is nothing analytical really can be done, but wild guesses and shots in the dark, only.
This may end in frustration and even accusations, while the problem had been solvable, the one way or the other.

 

[Maturin]

lags when I try and upload pic from directory with 1,000s of files

This can be a reason. Not so very long ago we had a thread about somebody had problems deleting files from a directory containg tenthousands of files. Point is, the number of files stored in a filesystem can be way larger than the system (shell) can handle it smoothly anymore.
But since "1,000s of files" is also a vague information, nothing else but general vague things can be said.