I have the same problem. It's particularly annoying because textlinked/image.tpl hardcodes image_class when it calls ezimage.tpl again. I thought I could fix it by overriding textlinked/image myself, and passing the appropriate image_class value through, but it seems that the arguments set by the initial attribute_view_gui call are not available...
The part I don't understand very well, is how come ezobjectrelation.tpl gets called in the first place? And then why doesn't it get called again when image.tpl calls attribute_view_gui again?