Allow Creation of Unlinked Field Collection Items

I would like to be able to use field collections for an entity while still being able to create this entity on its own without a link to a node. Let me give my use case, what I'm currently doing, and maybe someone has some thoughts or suggestions.

I would like to have image entities that have a few properties (image, title, alt, link, description, source, etc.). This is the field collection. I also have an article content type with which I can add unlimited "image" collections. The creation process would involve a user creating a new article and in the edit screen being able to add images just as you can now in the "embed" option for field collections. I would also like them to be able to create these image entities without an attached article. The reason for this is that we can now use views on the images and the articles separately if we want. We get the great separation of entities and the great workflow of embedded field collections.

My current solution is to create a dummy node of the article content type and create a URL Alias to the field collection add link for this dummy node. Example: field-collection/field-article-image/add/node/25 now has an alias of /node/add/article-image.

Is there a better way?

The reason for doing this instead of using node references is that the field collection process is much simpler, faster, and intuitive. Making a bunch of image nodes and then linking them to articles would be a pain.