What is the best way to easily save figures (or images?) to be then loaded into a matlab GUI?

I have a GUI with an axes, and for each analysis I have a set of figures I create. I then have a drop-down menu and I want to be able to select any of these to display on the GUI axes. These are quite complicated figures (multiple axes, multiple lines and bars, etc) so saving a .mat to re-load seemed cumbersome since I have to extract everything and re-plot manually (unless I am doing this wrong, which is quite possible). I am open to saving figures, saving images or whatever would load reasonably quickly. I dont want to open a new figure window for each. I do not have, nor am I going to get, the image processing toolbox. Thanks for your help.