Here's a suggestion for speeding up browsing pciture heavy threads. It would be nice if it was possible to set your default mode to not show pictures and to have it overridden by a link at a specific post that let you see the pictures in only that post. Did that make sense?

It makes sense, but it's not on my priory coding list either.

@Jan: unless you have made many changes to vB you'd like to keep proprietary, I bet other people on the forum would gladly help out. PHP isn't rocket science! ;)

Why not just instruct people not to post a single thread with 30+ pictures? Mostly I don't bother to browse through a post with that many pictures. Almost in all cases such posts are made up of collections of pictures taken from various sources trying to 'promote' a city. Only those sticky city picture collections get my attention.

^well don't open them then ;)
there's also a choice for viewing the posts, you can see them linearly, one by one, etc.
this way you can skip the ones you know have pics ;)
It's all in 'Display Mode'. right on top, above where it says #1 for the first post