Do I need a database?

The big thing you need to speed up the site is to have thumbnails of the images, instead of displaying the full size image on the page.

Take for example this page: http://www.embracesacredplaces.org/britain.html

You have a total of 51megs of images for the viewer to see. A database is going to do nothing the change that. A system that lets you upload the images and it will auto make thumbnails of the images for you, that will make a HUGE difference. (Granted, most systems that allow this will be database driven in the background)

For fun, I just went through and resized those 28 images down to the size that you display them at, (180x180px). It drops the total image size needed down load to only about 1meg, that is 50megs less than what you have, a HUGE difference on page load. (And also resizing them properly, gets rid of the stretched resizes, like the first image in the third row down). It was nothing fancy, I did them with the free Gimp editor with these steps:

1. Open the image in Gimp
2. In top menu: Image -> Scale Image
3. Set Width or Height (whichever is SMALLER) to 180 (let other one auto set)
4. Click the "Scale" button at bottom
5. In top menu: Image -> Canvas Size
6. Set Width or Height (whichever is NOT already 180) to 180.
7. Click the "Center" button to center the image
8. Some images you may want to drag it to something other than center (ie, if there was a lot of sky over the main object, drag it up so there is less sky in the thumnail)
9. Click the "Resize" button at bottom
10. In top menu: File -> Export As
11. It should default to the same directory you opened it, and default to .jpg, just add something like "_tn" or "_thumb" to the end (before the extension... filename_tn.jpg )
12. Click "Export" button
13. I let it defaults on the options screen (90 for quality level)

-Greg