Are there general guidelines or ZenPhoto best practices to speed up rendering a page worth of images? We recently turned on image rating and it's like the straw that broke the camel's back and has slowed the site down too much. While I understand that rating makes database calls for each photo, I'm thinking there are areas that I could look at to speed things up. If I cut down the number of images/page should this help?

Could you maybe be more specific? What theme? What Zenphoto? How do you use rating?

We use Highslide theme under ZenPhoto 1.2.8 [4881]. I've turned on pagination at 41 images/page and this has helped but I'm looking for additional ways to speed up the image thumbnail page display.

I've got the rating function tied to the caption so it only displays on the full expanded image.

Are the thumbnails "generated" realtime from the images each and every time a browser pulls up a page?

Could I look at downgrading thumbnail image quality, ( not the expanded image), to speed up the display? I guess I'm looking at any options to speed up the initial display to address a customer who is very focused on speed.

[i]Are the thumbnails "generated" realtime from the images each and every time a browser pulls up a page?[/i]
No, they are generated once and then cached. If the display is still slow it might just be the server or the connection that is. There is also a html cache plugin that you might want to try.

Besides the fact that 1.2.8 is not the current release and the theme is not supported the rating function itself may slow down the display, especially if it is loaded for each item on the page since it generates JS and form elements for each item.

Is there a tutorial that goes into detail concerning image caches? I've been reading as many forum posts as I can to assemble a better understanding, but if I could read some documentation, it would be better. Thanks

With even a nice diagram..: http://www.zenphoto.org/2009/03/troubleshooting-zenphoto/#22

Thanks so much