Successful patterns for using images in mods

Godot Version

4.2 (Mono)

Question

I’m developing mod support for my game. My mods are not .pck based, rather just directories on disk that come from Steam Workshop. I don’t use .pck because I don’t want to require modders to have to work with Godot. My mods use a Lua API to build custom content, they don’t replace parts of the game.

Anyway, mods can supply .pngs on disk for textures for the content they define. I can load them fine as Images from the file system and create Texture2D’s. My problem is that in multiple locations in my game, I use bbcode [img] tags to display images. AFAIK [img] requires a resource path specifically. Because my Texture2D’s come from ImageTextures, they don’t have a resource path.

Because the images come from the steam workshop dir, I can’t even refer to them with user://

The only solution I can see is to copy the image files to user://. I then have to do this every time the game runs, OR start doing wild “checksum/timestamp” type stuff to keep track of what’s been copied already, etc. Just a crazy amount of fragile work imho.

ALL I want is to be able to refer to files on disk using bbcode [img] tags. Is there a simpler/lighterweight solution than I’ve outlined above?