Thanks for sharing these ideas, @ahblake! We’ve been thinking a lot about how we display images, in a way that doesn’t compromise the quality or impact usability.
I’m curious if this is something you’ve heard from users or is this more of a form design challenge? We are currently working on the image upload question for Web Forms and are making it compact and aim to incorporate learnings into Collect based on user feedback. Here is a sneak peek of some of what @JenniferQ is cooking up 
In the new designs, we’ve fixed the height to 300px and the width is flexible/responsive depending on the image. We are trying to find a balance between conserving space (so users don’t need to scroll) and usability. We don’t want to make images too small because we don’t currently have the ability for users to enlarge or zoom yet –– it could work nicely with the big-image. We aim to use a similar pattern for selects with images for Web Forms and Collect – we will share more soon.
We are thinking this might be possible in the next Collect release after edits 
, as it’s related to other themes we are working on like displaying media in form filling and summary and improving selects. Although I don't think this solves you needs completely, I'm curious to get your thoughts.