lucy24 - 12:49 am on Jan 31, 2013 (gmt 0)

What about having a little bigger thumbnail in the search results and when someone clicks on the image it just opens the webmasters website without the miserable iframe and just shows you the article with the image in it as we meant for it to be shown?

It can only work if you set your images to no caching at all. And you probably don't want to do that.

The operative word is hotlink. The user's browser "thinks" it has already downloaded the image (when the user looked at it in Search), so it doesn't download it all over again when the user goes to your site five seconds later-- even though this time around you would have shown a different physical image.