My approach in the past has been to create a resource library. I wrote an article about two years ago,
Share Resources Across Multiple Projects[
^], that might be helpful.
Basically, you create a DLL project and add all your images (and any other resources you want to share.) Then create a class with static read-only properties that export those resource images. You can create different classes to export different types of resources, such as toolbar icons, button images, etc. Then compile to create a library you can link in to your projects.