Repairing macports after deleting image folders
I ran into something similar, however, it was during an upgrade outdated that the problem occurred. The issue happened because I had a connection failure part way through the transfer of gcc44, and it truncated the tar archive. I deleted this and expected it to fetch it again, but I just got the missing image error, and I couldn't find out how to get a copy of it. I tried all kinds of things like those above including rebuilding it, cleaning etc, but what eventually fixed it was

sudo port uninstall -f gcc44
sudo port install gcc44