After test-driving this patch for a bit, the main issue I foresee is that this can potentially hang Emacs if loading a lot of images over a slow SSH connection. This was also discussed in the previous thread from 2014.
I plan to mitigate this with an option to enable/disable/cache the remote images. For the cache'ing, visiting the remote files in their own Emacs buffers seems to work pretty well. I'm in the process of updating my copyright papers for my current employer, and will send an updated patch when I've got that sorted out. --Jack
