How to make a Photo Gallery?

Hi there. I'm triyng to make a photo gallery that loads photos from a local disk, makes previews, splits them between pages.. basic stuff. To create a full sized photo/preview I'm using the following code:

 public Photo(string file_name, int width, int height, Vector2 position, string caption)
         {
             float time = Time.realtimeSinceStartup;
             try {
                 texture = new Texture2D(2,2);
                 byte[] binaryImageData = File.ReadAllBytes(file_name);
                 Debug.Log ("loaded: " + (Time.realtimeSinceStartup - time).ToString());
                 texture.LoadImage(binaryImageData);
                 Debug.Log ("assigned: " + (Time.realtimeSinceStartup - time).ToString());
             }
             catch{
                 Debug.Log ("Null ref texture: " + file_name);
                 throw new Exception("Can't load texture:" + file_name);
             }
 
             float aspectRatio = texture.width / (float)texture.height;
             int resizedWidth, resizedHeight;
             if (texture.width / (float)width > texture.height / (float)height) { //Determine what dimension should be reduced more
                 resizedWidth = width;
                 resizedHeight = (int)(resizedWidth / aspectRatio);
             } else {
                 resizedHeight = height;
                 resizedWidth = (int)(resizedHeight*aspectRatio);
             }
             texture = ScaleTexture (texture, resizedWidth, resizedHeight, TextureFormat.RGB24);
             Debug.Log ("resized:"+ (Time.realtimeSinceStartup - time).ToString());
             this.width = width;
             this.height = height;
             this.caption = caption;
             this.position = position;
             this.file_name = file_name;
         }

The problem is: texture.LoadImage(binaryImageData) line takes way too long, like half a second (Photo is a JPEG file 4000x3000). This will lead to ridiculous loading/freezing times when dealing with hundreds of photos.

I tried to use WWW class and www.texture, www.textureNonReadable to no effect. Not only it almost doesn't reduce loading times (texture = www.texture line takes approx. 0.3 sec), but also has some known problems with unicode characters in the file path (which I have): WWW class doesn't read widechar url???

Please help and tell me, how can I load this many images? The only way I can think of for now, is to load them via multithreading. And I wish I can evade this.