@Dave - busy here , I have workers in my house and could can't get online at all times.
I fired up the mac and the post and image I linked above took me a count of 20 to open just now with Safari, and 16 to open with Chrome.
And I saw that I made a mistake - that photo I posted the link to above was from the Plant ID forum - when I said it was in the new database images.
however, just now when I went into the birds/bees forum and opened random images posted this month, they all opened in 2-3 seconds. Same for the images in the thread I checked in a long thread in the perennial forum "color echoes" that I have never looked at before, so I know no photos there were opened by me before.
I wonder why some load fast, others slow? I tried to be sure I was picking images from random people, different orientations etc.
