Image transforms and modal gallery
When 'generateTransformsBeforePageLoad' =&gt; true is set, is it taking a long time to load because of the sheer number of images you have or is it only on the first request when all of the transforms are being generated?

After they are generated, they are quickly served directly by Apache (or whatever your webserver is) and Craft doesn't get involved.

If it's because of the sheer number of images you have, then you'll probably want to look at a front-end method of lazy loading the images as they are needed.