Well, what I'm suggesting is that you keep the product name and use Smarty to automatically pull the image name based on the product name or sku. For example, to use sku (since it is simpler), you would just place this code where you want the image to appear:
<img src="{$ImagesDir}/titles/{$product.productcode}.jpg" alt="{$product.product}">
That would pull an image from teh skin1/images/titles/ folder with the sku number as the image name, so sku.jpg. You could then just upload all the images to that folder and not have to add them manually in the admin. It would preserve the site map and category product titles as well. What do you think, would that work?