I need a little advice from the gurus regarding a more user-friendly site. My main concern is the downloading time for a picture section in my site. I basically set up a simple GoTo driven scene that goes from thumbnails to enlargements. The problem is the more pictures I add the bigger the file gets (obviously). Now the enlargements are compressed down to manageable sizes (50k) but when the scene involves 30 some odd shots, the page gets into the 1.5mb range. So loading the scene for the 56kers comes in at a snail's pace.

So my question is how to make a progressive load or load on demand. So eventually when I add more and more pics to this section, the file would get in the 2 – 3mb range. But rather than wait for all the pics to load, what's the trick to presenting the opening menu to the pics without waiting for everything to load? I know I could use a preloader but that would still involve waiting for all the pics to load.

So should I set up the menu on the opening scene and jump to additional scenes for the pics? Or can I leave them all on the same time line and load when needed? So the bottom line, for a picture/slide-show presentation, what's your advice for a more user-friendly presentation?

Thanks in advance.