I am currently reading the forum without pictures. That's a very nice option. It's even nicer that it turns the pics into links that I can click through if I choose.
However, it would be nicer still if there was a button with which you could re-enable pictures for any given page of a thread, just in case it's full of 500 pictures and you don't want to load all of them up, one at a time, in a new browser (tabs).