When continuously reading the content of SD card and printing it on the screen, as time goes by, the refresh rate decreases

Does this mean you have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of images on the SD Card ?

The issue is that opening the file will take longer if the firmware has to search through many directory entries. So yes, the apparent time to open an image may take longer.

Have a small number of files on the SD Card. It’s better to have one large file that you access for data and keep that large file open. That’s how I did the video playback in this post.