oh, i totally missed the dev part sorry…
and hmm…the amount of images is large but not insanely large. maybe try finding a really small image and use that in the ACF instead just to see if it is still taking forever. if it does still take a long time than you can rule out the image/s size as the problem. if it speeds up your load time than it would seem the problem is with the image sizes. in my experience, ACF, even coded poorly doesnt take an enormous time to run. sorry if this isnt much help….i know how much of a headache slow loading time can be.
