My suggestion was to have an additional field in the content type, which ask you if your content is to be displayed as image.
The following step would be to create an Intro template override that tests the value of the previously mentioned field and based on the value displays the position fields or just the image. Of course, your (single) content view will not be affected.
If you want this to happen automagically for just the first item in the list, regardless of the type, maybe you should start looking into some way to have an auto-incremented value, which would be tested in an Intro position override.