No request links for images. Towards #1005.

That was a stylistic change, and probably shouldn't have gotten jumbled up with the actual bug fixing. 

(In my mind, it's a little bit dangerous to write instance methods, and then to pass in all the information they need as parameters: I'm more comfortable when it is class/module method, so you know there's no dependence on the state of the object... or if no parameters are passed in which duplicate fields of the object.)

Thinking it is best to abandon this branch, and make a new one with just the bug fixes.