Greg,

I had something similar creating a list of all Facid's on a worksheet.
What worked (partially) is

- to resize cells so the pictures fit nicely in a cell.
- to set each picture to move and size with cells. (set this as shape
default is the fastest way)
- hide columns/rows with pictures you don't need

This prevents Excel from drawing them, and hence you could have some
speed increase

BTW I would suspect a procedure that updates the picture objects with
new picture files to work faster. I have not investigated this, but I
suspect the overhead would be less. You would need to move the
row/column of pictures leaving the screen area to the opposite side and
update their picture elements with the new pictures. The actual picture
objects would always be the same, and not change, just their image.
This would prevent Excel to constantly destroy and recreate objects.

DM Unseen