Nice use of imageLens! I like this a lot. Seems like somebody should add an intelligent lazyload to timelineJS or jerusalem_maps at some point. Your project really tests the limits on that front.
I get this state for a while on a speedy connection and current machine: http://cl.ly/QbEs
Chrome dev tools show a bunch of other images being loaded before the one that matters gets taken care of.
(at 10s I get the image for the initial timeline point: http://cl.ly/QbZx and here is what's happening beforehand: http://cl.ly/Qbee)
Looks like this is partially thumbnails (which take a while despite their small size - not sure what's going on here) plus some larger images that aren't the first timeline point's image.
Got it. Good catch, thanks! We put the site together pretty quickly, so left the images at their original, slower server. I need to move them to gh-pages and check performance again.