The lightbox loads very slowly when there are lots of images in a particular gallery. The effect is that a user clicks a single image, expecting it to “pop up”. Nothing happens for quite some time, there is no feedback whatsoever, and only eventually does the entire gallery contents load into the lightbox.

I realize the lightbox user is *also* expecting to be able to scroll left and right through the images. However, the initial effect is of “nothing happening” for quite some time.

I’d suggest a better method to load the lightbox would be to load the image, with maybe one image either side of it. And to load other images further left and right, depending on the direction of scroll.

It’s clear this is more work than it sounds, to implement, but the current situation is untenable with large galleries.