imagesLoaded seems like the best solution (at the time of writing, Nov 2014) to detect whether an image is loaded or not.
I found that imagesLoaded library has the following characteristics:
All the above features point into the direction of a very high quality product. However, there is a couple of information I still cannot find explicitly mentioned nor on the official website imagesloaded.desandro.com, nor on the Github page github.com/desandro/imagesloaded:
Even though I assume the answer to the 2nd question being obvious, I would appreciate a confirmation.
EDIT: I just remembered this answer mentioned it working on IE7+ https://stackoverflow.com/a/19959809/759452, further feedback is still welcome though
EDIT 2: I just found another source saying it does not support IE7, this time by the creator of the library himself, see message from "desandro on 30 Nov 2012" on github.com/desandro/imagesloaded/issues/16
It seems that imagesloaded is officially supported by IE8+.
See the answer from David DeSandro (the creator of the library) on https://github.com/desandro/imagesloaded/issues/168
Officially, imagesLoaded v3 does not support IE7 and below.
And also:
In my testing, it was successful in IE8, IE9, IE10, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on desktop, and Mobile Safari for iOS.
Note: I will do some further testing & update this answer accordingly