Damus show a very blurred version of the images (few pixels really) before we tap them to load them.
Where are the blurred images located?
The reason for the blurred image is for bandwidth? Privacy?
Discussion
Sounds like low bandwidth preview where all images are proxied and recompressed by a Damus server? It's a very reasonable thing to do. It also improves your privacy because your client IP isn't seem directly grabbing images from random web servers.
It’s blurred on the fly. We’ve had multiple explicit image floods and such - so unless you are following someone, images are masked until revealed. Global at times became a mess 😅
It could likely be less strict, like show for following reposts and friends of friends.
Many spam notes can have offending images (porn), that's why...