Oh, this attack would be a useful tool for e.g., identifying whistleblowers that travel a lot (e.g., in academia, military). If you know their Signal ID, you could send them images from time to time and then compare their coarse locations with travel information for a number of suspects.
I believe they'd have to accept the chat request before any images would be loaded?
Looking at the app options it seems to be possible to disable media auto-download entirely; there's tickboxes for Images/Audio/Video/Documents via Mobile Data/Wi-Fi/Roaming.