This looks like a really cool project. Too bad I can't possibly look at it because all the photos are so gigantic in terms of data!
I thought the RCU photo loading utility automatically decreased the size of oversized pix. Apparently not.
One suggestion to wingwarper... before loading them, run your pix through Photoshop or some similar program to resize them do they can be viewed. As a test, I managed to get one typical photo up and it was 2.37MB! No wonder the page takes so long to load and the individual pix become impossible to deal with.