Originally, that is what I wanted to do... but it would involve a lot more code to accomplish. It would also add another set of images to store and build.
There might be a few things you could do easily to help with this. First, turn down the sub-album-ness. Only show little thumbs for the first level of sub-albums. This could save you a fair amount of space. Second, only show 5-6 main albums per page on the main page. Third, I would perhaps reduce the size of my thumbs. This could help a bit. You may also want to double check that your thumbs don't contain any EXIF data. Gallery should strip it, but with all the --option changes for NetPBM and IM, its sometimes snuck through. EXIF data can double or triple the size of a thumb. Fourth, it should be possible (though I don't know how!) to add a "mini-thumbs on/off" drop down option to the page that defaulted to off. Then your users could decide if they wanted to see it.
Of course, if you are trying to cator to 56k users, you should really just simply turn them off. No amount of shrinking the image's file size can make up for the fact that there will still be 20-30+ images to download.
