You’re in the right file, shutter-reloaded is where you’ll want to make the change. It looks like the gallery plugin is parsing the entire document for its links to start. That function is called init on line 34. Inside that function, the plugin is going to loop through all the links on the page and … Read more
Output all images of each gallery in your HTML. Use an anchor tag that links to the fullsize image around each thumbnail. Depending on the lightbox plugin you prefer to use, group all images from the same gallery (often done using the rel attribute in HTML). At that point, just hide all but one thumbnail … Read more
Try the Lazy Load plugin — its code is said to be used on WordPress.com VIP sites, and the plugin is pretty current (last updated July 4th). Caution! Lazy loading images is tricky on slow connections, where there’s a chance that images fail to load at all. Even a small bug or incompatibility in the … Read more
Have you had a look at the rewrite API? Maybe this can solve your problem? If you use the rewrite API, then you probably should turn of NextGen rewrite function.