IMHO, Edizkan Adil Ata's idea is actually the most proper way. It extracts the URLs of anchor tags and puts them in a different tag. And if you don't want to let the anchors being seen by the page visitor then just .hide()
them all with JQuery or display: none;
in CSS.
Also you can perform prefetching, like this:
<link rel="prefetch" href="imagefolder/clouds.jpg" />
That way you don't have to hide it and still can extract the path to the image.