@MikeLippincott mentioned that sometimes tools in this space have a hard time with customization in terms of how they interrelate profile / metadata with images. We could remedy this with additional flexibility in CDF to manually specify image file or data references.
Example pseudocode (this functionality does not yet exist):
cdf = CytoDataFrame(
data=df, # imagine a 3 row set of profile data without filepaths
raw_images = [array1, array2, array3], # each array would align with the index of the dataframe and render in a new col (similar for filepaths maybe too!)
)