I agree with Donnie, remove it and do a redirect. Caution as some servers don't like this type of redirect as it sees it as circular so test it.

if your rankings are improving, then good move!

Why do you need Google to reach inside your img folder? Images display on the page and are indexed then. Sure, if you are selling images, then I can see the need for this, but to just crawl the img folder??

If it is not huge, I do not see it penalizing you. I would make sure all images are named using keywords as crawling pic001.jpg, pic002.jpg, product01.jpg, logo.gif will not do you any good anyway.

Also I find bad linking coming from Google image searches. No one searches to purchase a coffee cup and looks in Google images to do so. Conversely, if someone is searching images of coffee cups to use in whatever, having them click over to your site is a waste of time. They are just going to grab the image and go leaving your metrics a mess.

I hope that helps.

Most assuredly use different CC-TLDs! I would also point to each from each as you have seen on many global sites. This will allow you to use different keywords also as Europe and the US have different spellings for the same words. So make sure your shopping cart software allows this if you are using the same across all domains.

This will help in link building also as it would be harder to get a spanish website linking to an english website even with sub domains.