This has been fixed in what will become Emacs 24.4. IOW, it works in recent development snapshots of Emacs 24.
v
in Dired works just as you request: it shows the image. And then n
, p
, and q
do just what you would expect: show the next or previous file (image), and quit, respectively. Each image is shown in image-mode
, which binds n
etc. to DTRT.
Consider just picking up the image-mode.el
code from a dev snapshot and adding that to your init file. Dunno whether you might need to fiddle with some of that code so it works well with Emacs 24.3 (or whatever Emacs version you are using).