Metal_X : I made the two plugin 
Kyatric kindly mentionned.
The base64 string thing is really old, as old as the web (older, in fact, since it was made to allow people exchange binary files over mail, which allowed only text at that time...).
The idea is very simple : every byte of a file on a computer is a number between 0 and 255. However, when you want to represent a character in a text files, there are less letters in the alphabet and the punctuation thatn 255. In fact, the characters are numbered from 33 to 126 ('M' is 77 for example).
So the base64 algorithm is simple : when you encounter a byte from the file, you represent it with one or more character (i.e. the byte '34' would be 'AG', the byte 201 would be '=/' and so on. It's not the real mapping, it's there to illustrate <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />).
If you do that for the whole image file, you have the whole sequence of byte (each one ranging from 0 to 255) converted in a printable character sequence (each one covering 32 to 126 hence the 64 in base64).
You are going to object "Hey, if for each byte, you convert it to two or more letters, the representation in base64 is longer than in bytes !". That's true. base64 add around 33% overhead to the file size. That's the price to pay to be sure that the base64 string is always going to be readable, no matter what language the user is using on is machine (old 7 bits english ASCII, 8 bits european with '�','�','�', letters, complex tables with ideographic characters in Asia, etc...). At least you are sure that those 64 characters are the same everywhere.
Since it's so old, browser can naturally handle those base64 string. You can specify directly a base64 string as an image source, and the browser will display it happily (that's what my behaviors are doing).
Since it's a string, you can easily store it as text directly in localStorage, WebDB, send it over WebSocket and all...
With one of my behavior, you can extract the base64 string of an image. Since a few builds, you can enter that string directly as an URL in a Sprite, 
Ashley added the code to the Sprite object.
Everything you store in localStorage is going to be cached forever (at least for a long time, the decay is different for each browser, but at least 9999 days or the like <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />). It's not true on mobile (oh, surprise !), because the system can decide that "the phone is full, I need to do some space !" (especially true on iOS).
If you want to lighten the download for your client, you can store the images in localStorage. You need however to have a system to check the image version when you are going to add new card to your game ("is the card I'm introducing newer thatn the one cached in localStorage ?")