I had a similar issue some time ago. In my case I didn't need to explode all nested elements, just the inner one where the image is. I am guessing that this is what Gaieus meant when he said "do not explode the component though but edit and explode the image inside". Seems like you just didn't go "deep" enough when you tried the first time, so my guess is that you don't need to explode 3 times, but just once on the inner nested element which is the image entity. Doing it this way you maintain the advantages of a component.