jquery (or mootools) will likely have a library that does lazy loading or asynchronous loading of images. lazy loading loads the images as they are pulled into the viewport - asynchronous allows the page to load and then loads the images sequentially on the page.
jquery (or mootools) will also allow you to control dom units so that you could have an onclick handler that would populate the <div> with the appropriate html which would then load the images/html.
ajaxrain.com would probably be one source for an addon that would do it.