Ideal in this case might be to load images that are within one or two screenfuls of the current position, then someone scrolling down actually ingesting the con

Ideal in this case might be to load images that are within one or two screenfuls of the current position, then someone scrolling down actually ingesting the content might not be bothered by the delay as they probably won't see it. That would require JS though, and you need to deal with page resizes as well as scroll events. Also make sure you include width & height settings for the image tag or you scroll position reference will be off when considering images further down the page. Maybe load a low-res placeholder for the other images in case the user drops offline as they scroll, either an "image not loaded" marker just so they know something _should_ be there or a very compressed version of the actual photo.