That makes sense. I’ll talk to folks here about moving the image loading features into Runtime. The main downside is that it pulls in third party libraries which then need to be vetted on all of our runtime platforms. So it is a little more complicated than a normal engine runtime feature.
In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the DevIL image library (http://openil.sourceforge.net/, GitHub - DentonW/DevIL: Developer's Image Library (DevIL) is a cross-platform image library utilizing a simple syntax to load, save, convert, manipulate, filter, and display a variety of images with ease. It is highly portable and has been ported to several platforms.) or something similar. Chances are those actually support a much broader range of formats that we currently do for texture importing. I know the team had discussed switching over to using a library like that for the editor itself, too.
–Mike