The 'unique image' idea floated earlier isn't going to help. My main problem is albums, and the URL change for them is from www.mysite.com/album.html to www.mysite.com/album/ and nothing short of a deep and ill-advised code hack is going to help solve that problem. If I hadn't done that silly album URL rewrite then I'd have no problems now. Groan.
My original post was about rewrites and redirection. I've got that working now. I've created some rules in htaccess that are working well. So there's no pressing need for 'unique image', as it's not needed for redirection, and it isn't really needed in practice for FB likes. Unique image would solve the FB like problem for me on image pages, but image pages aren't the main cause of that problem, so the practical benefit would be negligible.
That said if 'unique image' ever gets implemented, I may well use it.
The end.