Well you can optimize your images to be smaller in size so that browser handles them more quickly.
Try to have no image scaling if image on you page needs to be 500px x 500px its best that image relay has that size.
There is one solution that is little complicated and it makes maintenance of your site difficult. You can embed images in base64. When in base64 images are loaded with rest of content (not asynchronously after html is loaded).
See this link:
www.sweeting.org/mark/blog/2005/07/12/ba...ges-embedded-in-html