I don’t fully understand this request. What’s the goal here? To link to a picture instead of embedding it?
Consider a random image on the discourse homepage, the URL is https://www.discourse.org/a/img/homepage-5a.jpg.
If I paste that URL on a line by itself:
If I put text before the link: https://www.discourse.org/a/img/homepage-5a.jpg
Can you elaborate on what you’re trying to achieve, what the goal is?