Ok. Thought about it some more. What about leave game as is but if there is ANY special item like a book with story content, a magical axe, magic arrows, a potion of speed, whatever that is of greater worth, if the characters come near those items they roll Perception to see if they spot then. Like spotting traps, they roll to spot special or valuable, not mundane gear or story items. If they succeed, the item or container highlights like a trap does now, so the player knows something special is there.
That way, players can search through every little thing if they want, but it gives players who don't want to do that the ability to still find cool stuff. Then, if I don't want to pick up everything, I just wont. My choice. Carry nothing if I want. Carry everything if you want.
But in this situation, players
still have to search through the barrels because they don't know if they succeeded their perception checks or not.
Unless they're also notified if they failed the check, but at that point why not just always highlight special-item containers and/or remove any non-special-item containers?
