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One idea which I'm sure others thought of already (I just thought of it though) is to turn on/off the option in user preferences where it loads the original image. Have it load the sample, then if you like it, you can save it and queue that up and just have them come in when they come in. Instead of waiting for the whole picture to load before saving.

Additionally, I find that if I wait for the whole picture to load, I often open multiple tabs of images, this causes FF2 to redownload whole images at times, meaning I'm using twice the bandwidth I really need.