As far as metadata versus data, the URL of a static image automatically discloses the image itself. The only way to claim that the history doesn't actually contain the image is if you assume that the site has gone defunct.
Unless, of course, you're willing to argue that a porn image stored on the local hard drive isn't contained in any folders on the same PC that soft-link it. You might have an interesting time trying to justify why it is contained in folders that hard-link it.
Am I confused about what browser history is or what? Unless you open a static image in a new tab to look at it or you download it (as opposed to simply looking at it on the page it's on), then how on earth would its URL show up in browser history, which by definition tracks user-visited webpages (i.e. top-level links) and not every single URL the browser makes a request to?
Sure, info about non-top-level links is extractable from e.g. request caches, but that's a different thing from the browser history SQLite DB.
That's not the URL of a static image, that's the URL of a web page that happens to have a static image as the only content of worth in it and puts the description of said image in the URL.
Calling it the URL of an image seems to me like quite a bit of confusion about how web pages work.
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