Where the f*** is it??

Again, a weird discovery is going to change everything. I considered it freaky when an image put in a Steemit post – that it stored in cdn.steemitimages.com – appeared as an image when that address was put in a post on Facebook that, when clicked on, opened its own stand-alone tab with a window that put it in an enlargeable, pannable viewer... six times enlargement.
I then made up some memes to take advantage of this, and used them in a Facebook campaign as a control detail when I wrote a series of Medium blog posts about stacking the deck when feeding experiences to deep learning algorithms. Those memes are what was here a month ago.
Yesterday, as a fluke, I used a Steemit address image to put one of these images from last month in a memory stick off-line browser-based html page so the topic would have an image when on line. And to my surprise, the html code retained the image when the page was opened off line, and opened the viewer too!
Since the purpose of the page was to have a mobile-friendly, all text read of the Medium series I immediately checked the file size, expecting that it absorbed the viewer and the 5 Mb image file. No. The size was the same 169 Kb as when it was text alone.
Then I put three of these cdn.steemitimages files in and it didn't move the dial on the page at all. Still 169 Kb. Where the f*** is it??
Ok. I was preparing a presentation for an Internet artwork that needed to display some pretty intricate images. Without any further thought on this, in a leap of faith, I'm going to really push the envelope and put nine panels filled with 250 signatures each here in Steemit to copy their cdn.steemitimages addresses into this html page. What can break?
Stay tuned.