Our Forum automatically shrinks images in width, but it cannot dynamically reduce the quality to fit that size. We can tell people to try to resize them before publishing, but it's not something we could enforce (not that you're asking me to make a rule, here). That would very likely be the cause of it, as the Forum itself is not a lot of kilobytes and you do not have ads to contend with here.
I can suggest a fix on your end and for anyone else that struggles with load times in stories: Go to Profile > Look and Layout > Messages to Display per page. That is usually set at Forum default (25) and is fine for people with broadband and viewing a normal topic. By cutting this by over half (10), you could have fewer images to download at once when you hit a story page. You can even go as low as 5 if you like, but it would be a lot more loading to get to the next chapter if the story has a lot of comments.
Edit : I just realized that i don't know if these settings work right in tapatalk, but if they DO offer that solution it would be the best one. Either it has its own settings or goes off your profile settings. Hard to say!
