Mnemotechnics is an art of memorizing by linking visual images. A book I have gives these criteria for a proper image:

you can roughly draw the object from memory

you can name its main parts

you can name its main colors

you can describe its spatial orientation

The image shouldn't be as clear as a hallucination, and it should be a memory of a specific object, not a generic one. Meeting these criteria is already enough to link another image to it, for example by piercing it with another object, though there's also the question of imagining it at a large enough size.

Aphants, do these hold for you? Take Doge, the popular meme dog: not a generic Shiba Inu, but that exact picture. Could you sketch it, name its parts and colors, and say which way it's facing? And could you imagine, say, a pencil piercing it?