There seem to be three ways to add images to a node:
Is there a way to do it where images are NOT nodes, but also we don't need to use a special node type (that includes an image field) to upload an image we want to display on a page. Also, we want to share a given image between multiple pages.
Here is a page with an overview of upload modules.
Decision:
We use CCK ImageFields and create a content type "Page with images". No extra UIs (we manually use the upload field provided by ImageFields)