Try RSS, like Magpie RSS – PHP RSS Parser or Google Feed API — Google Developers to pull posts without using WP’s library.
Google Groups has forum posts on pulling images, and someone at SO found a way to pull images from Magpie: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3490740/pulling-images-from-rss-atom-feeds-using-magpie-rss There are lots of other resources via Google.