hey everyone I had the same problems everyone is describing.. This is how I resolved my problem.
I had built my joomla site on a localhost and then migrated to media temple...
I was having trouble actually displaying the images, like so many of you I was just getting a white box with the title but no image.
Using Firebug- ,Firefox plug-in that shows html and css code, I was able to determine the ftp location of my image files.
Cool iris uses the rss feed generated by the phoca to display your images. So what I did was use firebug to and clicked on the images to determine their location. they were located in 'xyz'.rss so i opened up my ftp client, downloaded the rss file, and performed a simple FIND AND REPLACE anywhere in the RSS that it said 'Localhost' and replaced it with my domain name.
for example
<link>
http://localhost/joomla15/images/phocag ... b_l_canvas awning - front view.png</link>
became
<link>
http://xyz.com/joomla15/images/phocagal ... b_l_canvas awning - front view.png</link>