Static image management module for Drupal 7
If you're just using static images as part of of your theme, you are indeed correct in your suggestion that using an image field is overkill. I'd even go so far as to say it's entirely incorrect to use image fields for static theme content: fields aren't very portable and add way too much overhead to something that'll likely be a part of every page on the site.

Instead, handling static images is built directly into Drupal's core API and theming layer (so, no need for a separate module). What you'll to do is reference the images in your theme using preprocess functions and the Drupal API.

Let's assume you have a logo (logo.png) in the images/ directory of your theme, and you want to display that logo on every page. In the page.tpl.php template file of your theme, you could do something like this:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="/path/to/theme/images/logo.png" alt="My Site" class="logo nav-home" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;


But that's pretty brittle: what if the theme moves to another directory? What you want to do instead is create a variable such that you could do something like this:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;?php print $logo; ?&gt;&lt;/p&gt;


To do that, you create a preprocess function to create a variable for use in your templates. In your theme's template.php file, create the following function (if it doesn't already exist):

// Replace MYTHEME with your theme's short name
function MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&amp;$variables) {
}


Then, get the path to the logo using drupal_get_path():

// Replace MYTHEME with your theme's short name
function MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&amp;$variables) {
  $theme_path = drupal_get_path('theme', 'MYTHEME');

  $logo_path = $theme_path . '/images/logo.png';
}


Finally, render the path to the logo as an image using theme_image():

// Replace MYTHEME with your theme's short name
function MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&amp;$variables) {
  $theme_path = drupal_get_path('theme', 'MYTHEME');

  $logo_path = $theme_path . '/images/logo.png';

  // Prepare the information needed to theme an image
  // @see theme_image()
  $image = array(
    'path' =&gt; $logo_path,
    'alt' =&gt; t('My Site'), // t() makes a string translatable
    'attributes' =&gt; array(
      'class' =&gt; array('logo', 'nav-home'),
    ),
  );
  $variables['logo'] = theme('image', $image);
}


Now, $logo is available for use anywhere in your theme's page.tpl.php. Do the same process (get the path to the image, then assign the themed image to a variable) for any other static images you want to use as part of your theme.