My site is loading slow. I have 38429 Images and 613 Albums. I am on a shared host. What can i do to improve performance?

Just be patient. Once you images have all been cached you should not have problems.

if you have your image thumb sizes etc. set to the sizes specified in your theme you can pre-cache images. unfortunately this must be done for every album individually.

you can also speed things up with a little tinkering:

if your host doesn't allow mod_gzip or mod_deflate in apache, you can set php to gzip in the .htaccess file as shown here: http://mrrena.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-to-compress-php-and-other-text.html

configuring ETags and sending expires headers lets browsers use local cache. using css sprites for background images reduces http requests. see http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html and the yslow plugin http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ for firebug http://getfirebug.com/

figuring out what css rules you can simplify may also speed up the browser. the page speed plugin for firebug is good for that. http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

It is actually not necessary to precache: http://www.zenphoto.org/2009/03/troubleshooting-zenphoto/#22

i stand corrected about pre-caching in zp. i guess i won't do that for my site anymore either.