using image node's nid instead of preset in URL

Hi,

I have inherited a Drupal site, and the previous developer hacked imagecache and added an interesting feature. If the

part in the URL is numeric, it checks whether this is a legal nid of an image node (using image.module), and then uses that image as the image source. I would like to clean up the module and I was wondering how would this be implemented cleanly, maybe using some kind of token support, or otherwise. I cannot remove this hack alltogether, since it is present all over the (large) site, and cleaning all these up is close to impossible at the moment. If you think this might be an interesting development for imagecache, and might be included in imagecache upstream, I can prepare a patch (I'm on 5.x, I guess you'll want the patch for 6.x) and post it here. Looking forward for suggestions...