Thanks Carl for the prompt reply.
I found the same tutorials, which you suggest above, last night and continued to develop my concept. The video is a great help and LoaderMax works brilliantly. I have still got a lot to solve but I'm getting there. Your advise on displaying the content is very helpful.
Is there anything I should consider to ensure that once downloaded the images will persist in my user's cache should they return to view them again? I understand that the user's browser cache settings are beyond my control but if I organise all of the downloaded media into say an arrayCollection or dictionary of some type should I add the imageLoader objects into it or their respective content?