Bumping this again. It looks like we still don't have any way to align images vertically within the text line, and the default is still to align them to top.
This kind of makes the "height" property useless, because if you make your height smaller than the line height, the image raises up above your text. It looks bad.
Even if no direct control is given to users, just changing the default to center vertically would be a huge improvement. This was talked about months ago like it would be no problem, but never implemented. Wouldn't default vertical alignment be easy to do? The line height is known.