Impress (and other OOo's components too) allows to either embeed the image into
the document/presentation by including its content into OOo document file (in
this example case I'd be refering to *.sxi file), or alternatively to just link
it with the document/presentation - in such case image is loaded on use. This
dramatically reduces the size of *.sxi file but causes at least two major
issues. First of all the file path for each image is kept as absolute (i.e.
"/home/carlos/impress/files/foo/bar/img/smth.jpg"). This makes the document
almost non portable (if I hand it to other *nix user along with the images s/he
have to rebuild all the directories to make the presentation works. Of course I,
knowing this issue could predict such problems and i.e. make some symlinks to
reduce impact, but it's not that hard to imagine that i.e. Windows' user would
be complaining again having big problems bringing my presentation to life.

The solution would be to store the path as relative path to *.sxi file and/or
give the user option to determine if s/he wants relative or absolute paths for
linked images (default shall be "relative").