Programmatically place image field as default value in form plugin
Turns out I needed to get the fid of the images and place them into an array. First I started by retrieving the images like I did before 

    if ($node-&gt;get('field_equipment_photo')-&gt;entity != null) {
        $photos = $node-&gt;get('field_equipment_photo');
    }


Then I grabbed the fid and placed them into the default value like so

if ($photos[$i]-&gt;entity-&gt;fid-&gt;value != null) {
                $form['image'.$i]['#default_value'] = array($photos[$i]-&gt;entity-&gt;fid-&gt;value);
            }


For some reason even though the fid is just one value it still needs to be wrapped in an array when being used as the default value.