RE: how to not show images?

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

    Ehrm, apparently you don't share my sense of humor.

Ya never know... ;-)

    More seriously, why would you want such a user option for Emacs?

Dunno, there might be several uses.

You might want to select all of the text, without picking up the images, to
send the text to some application.

You might be accessing a bunch of documents remotely, and don't want to deal
with the load time (as you mentioned).

You might want to copy+paste to an application, without including the
images.

One trivial use I would make of this right now is for my thumbnail frames
(http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/FisheyeWithThumbs). I shrink frames
by changing the frame font size, but images don't shrink accordingly. For
the speedbar frame I just turn off image display during thumbification, for
now. (For the same reason, I remove the menu-bar, tool-bar, and scroll-bar.
In Emacs 20, I leave the scroll bar: it shrinks nicely and is still
functional.)

For that application, of course, a better feature to request would be the
ability to resize all of the images in the buffer/frame, instead of
eliminating them. Not finding such a feature, I thought I'd ask whether
there might be a global image-display toggle.