That is unfortunate. Uploading the same images over and over will take up storage space, crowd the database and perhaps eventually hurt search engine results with so many repeated images. WordPress coders should figure out how to change that.
Starting from my present htaccess file, would it be like so?
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wp/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
php_value upload_max_filesize 16M
php_value post_max_size 16M
# END WordPress
