Normally I shy away from "end of" or "death of" posts, but this makes sense. Pagination evolved from people having 56k modems and it taking two minutes to load a page. Add some images in, and you're going to be there a while.

I really like the idea of intelligent search and only showing relevant content vs just showing everything on the page and hoping people will find it. It seems so obvious now, but the status quo is so ingrained in us. Sometimes I do want to see the 873rd image, sometimes it's just the one I'm looking for, but burried under endless pages of other images. Having some sort of search (either tagging, date, or text) can really make this process easier for users.