Interestingly, the JVM caches images that are obtained using
the usual Toolkit methods (the ones most mentioned in tutorials,
and the ones generally called by AWT and Swing components).

Whether that works 'as expected' in a browser's JVM is another
matter.

Image slideshows generally suffer the OOME problem you are
referring to.  As a way around those problems, you can abandon
the general  methods of obtaining an image, and instead use your
own methods to get the bytes themselves - this puts caching
back in your control.

But there's a 'gotcha' here.  An Image object takes up far more
bytes of memory than the associated bytes[] stored in the file,
especially with JPEG's.

The way around it is to store the original bytes you load for each
image into a byte[][] array, then stamp each set of bytes out to a
single Image using Toolkit.creatImage(byte[]) at the moment
you need to display it.

I wrote a slideshow that held references to 2 Images (the
current image, as well as the 'next' - about to be displayed),
as well as a byte[][] arary of the bytes of all the images.
This allowed me to run slideshows of 100's of images within
the standard 64Meg JVM, and the caching problem was entirely
solved.

HTH

Andrew T.