Optimized Image Loading in a UIScrollView

I have a UIScrollView that has a set of images loaded side-by-side inside it. You can see an example of my app here: http://www.42restaurants.com. My problem comes in with memory usage. I want to lazy load the images as they are about to appear on the screen and unload images that aren't on screen. As you can see in the code I work out at a minimum which image I need to load and then assign the loading portion to an NSOperation and place it on an NSOperationQueue. Everything works great apart from a jerky scrolling experience.

I don't know if anyone has any ideas as to how I can make this even more optimized, so that the loading time of each image is minimized or so that the scrolling is less jerky.

- (void)scrollViewDidScroll:(UIScrollView *)scrollView{
    [self manageThumbs];    
}

- (void) manageThumbs{
    int centerIndex = [self centerThumbIndex];
    if(lastCenterIndex == centerIndex){
        return;
    }

    if(centerIndex >= totalThumbs){
        return;
    }

    NSRange unloadRange;
    NSRange loadRange;

    int totalChange = lastCenterIndex - centerIndex;
    if(totalChange > 0){ //scrolling backwards
        loadRange.length = fabsf(totalChange);
        loadRange.location = centerIndex - 5;
        unloadRange.length = fabsf(totalChange);
        unloadRange.location = centerIndex + 6;
    }else if(totalChange < 0){ //scrolling forwards
        unloadRange.length = fabsf(totalChange);
        unloadRange.location = centerIndex - 6;
        loadRange.length = fabsf(totalChange);
        loadRange.location = centerIndex + 5;
    }
    [self unloadImages:unloadRange];
    [self loadImages:loadRange];
    lastCenterIndex = centerIndex;

    return;
}

- (void) unloadImages:(NSRange)range{
    UIScrollView *scrollView = (UIScrollView *)[[self.view subviews] objectAtIndex:0];
    for(int i = 0; i < range.length && range.location + i < [scrollV