Currently, when doing development on an eZ Platform site, you have to sync all of the images down to your local machine. This is not feasible for medium to large sites with > 1GB (arguably, over more than 300MB) of images. The problem is that if you have a missing image on the page:

1) In dev mode, the page completely crashes
2) In prod mode, there is no image path generated, so you cannot use a URL decorator to point to a staging server with the images

In short, eZ Platform should be able to gracefully handle the fact that an image is missing on the file system.