Proxy images for materials - good or bad idea?

I had an idea while making some interiors that in order to keep everything nice and clean, Id use small 32x32 images in cart shop as proxies, and then call forth the actual image with all the bells and whistles in the material definition. In my head, it would be a great way of working. I could make the small images with little codes written out in the image itself of what the actual (not proxy) image is (shn_mtl for shiny metal or something like that). That way the actual images and the images the material images are entirely different. It seems really clean to me, especially if I wanted to make different materials that were based on the same image.

What im curious about is if TSE would load the proxy into memory and then load the actual image thats supposed to be used. If it loads both, then itd be inefficient use of memory... which obviously isnt good. If it would just use the proxy as a marker and only load the actual image... well I think you all know what that means...

World peace.


Just curious.


edit:sp