Please see my comment to the question.
I would suggest an alternative approach to the problem. Printing should be up to the user who probably knows better what to print and what not. It was a tradition to provide a "printer-friendly" page on user request (generate it on some anchor click), which you can do, but this design feature is getting obsolete while more and more complete implementation of CSS
Media Types is emerging in browser's layout engine implementations. Please see my past answer:
How to Print a Invoice[
^].
When the user prints the page or views the "Print preview", your page style, including layouts, changes accordingly, in a printer-friendly manner, but all the content, including images, remain the same. Unless you change visibility of some elements in your "@media print" styles, which is yet another stylistic element you can use for printing. But nothing will be disappearing by any mysterious reasons. :-)
—SA