Are you perhaps using the full size image and then just having it display at your smaller size? For example on one of the images, when I do "properties" from the right click menu it shows the image properties as 70px by 170px. However, when I do "View Image" from the right click menu, it renders as 214 x 546. That tells me that you are using your markup to display it at the smaller size, but the image is really the larger size. Seems like that means that you have to load all the larger images for the page to display. Try creating a series of thumbnail images and linking them to the larger images. I use Easy Thumbnails that will let you set, say the width for all of them and leave the height to be proportionate. (
http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/)
I am sure there are many other software programs that would do a similar thing. That gives you easy to manage thumbnail images that shouldn't take as long to load as the larger images. Just my 2 cents.... I am not an expert, just struggling along myself.
Webweaver