How do you not align with the biggest bounding box?

Question

This is driving me up the wall, I know a way around it, but at some point later in this project the work around won't be efficient enough.
Ok here is the problem, I have four objects that are going to be large oversized buttons on a website. Inside these buttons (which are square) I have placed a picture, as the picture is larger than the button area I have duplicated the button box and made it a clipping mask for the picture. I have aligned it all up and grouped everything for one button together as one big group. I have done this for each button, so now all buttons are made up of a group of objects.
The problem is because these images are too big for the buttons and I have clipped them there bounding box is bigger than the buttons so when I come to align them or distribute them it all goes wrong. Why? Well the distribution/alignment goes on the combined area bounding box, in this case the pictures are much bigger so it's pretty much there bounding boxes that everything is getting aligned with. In InDesign it treats the bounding boxes of objects within a clipping mask as being the size of the clipping mask, which is exactly what I want to do here. This seems a massive limitation and I can't see why I would ever want to distribute or align with something that I am effectivly removing from the document.
The work around is quite simple, I can take everything out of the button boxes, align the button boxes and then put everything back in the button boxes. This would be acceptable if I only had to do it once, but if (and I probably will) want to tweak the layout as I go it's going to be a pain in the rear.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

I could pre-crop the images in PS but then I loose the ease of changing them in Illustrator. I always try and do as much work as possible in Illustrator so I am able to undo or change things quickly, I am not a big fan of the finality of working with raster images.
The real issue is that the client is comming to look at some mockups and if they ask for changes, which we usually do there and then, we will look a bit silly as we complete destruct and then re-construct each object.
If those align scripts work how I am thinking I might make 4 place holder graphics (that I switch off when I am finished) and centre align each button to those with the scripts.
Illustrator should just be have an option to align the visable layers or items only. I would even accept the ability that when you switch off a layer in a group (say these pictures where there bounding box goes beyond that of the clipping mask) so your only active layer is a box the same size as your clipping mask and so that is the only bounding box that gets used, but no the off layers still have active bounding boxes.
Regards
Paul