There are multiple IRC clients that render inline images just fine and also some very nice web clients that allow posting such images directly from the app.
The main problem of IRC is IMHO that the large networks refuse to implement most of the newer IRCv3 standards or alternatively provide multi-client bouncers to their users.
IRCv3 doesn’t bring multimedia as far as I know. There are good changes to the protocol proposed, but they are moving too slow.
This would require an HTML image upload service, which is out of scope for IRCv3 protocol specs.
But nothing stops a server implementation from providing this, and as already said several client+bouncer combinations already support media uploads very well.
The slow moving isn’t the problem of the IRCv3 specs, the issue is the adoption by the large networks and subsequently the clients (which rarely implement features the vast majority of their users on the large networks can’t use).
