OLE is what MS decided to call its technology (Object Linking and
Embedding) for doing this stuff.
I haven't had any luck linking to smaller objects than a whole file.
YMMV.
Welcome to DTP! any things are much more difficult than we would like
them to be.

If you have a huge number of graphics and a small amount of text, maybe
it should be published in a different manner.
Will it need to be updated frequently? regularly? seldom? never?
Does it require clever or fancy layout?
Could it be published as a photo album with captions on each pic?
Could it be published as a catalog, with the pics referenced by a
database ?

Just some thoughts...
Jay