In dense regions of the sky ("crowded fields"), the standard Gaia operations scheme cannot cope with such an amount of overlapping stars. This has always been a known, unavoidable property of Gaia. However, around launch it was proposed to create special images from Gaia's Sky Mapper CCDs to fully cover crowded fields down to the detection limit, although at reduced measurement precision. During the development of Gaia, such images had been designed for technical purposes, but never been planned to be used for science. These images were recorded starting July 2014, i.e. right from the start of the scientific mission, and were just stored away for the time being. In early 2019 a small working group was set up within the scientific Gaia consortium (DPAC) to work on this topic. The talk will summarize the first steps and initial software solutions, the current status of the corresponding processing pipeline, as well as an outlook to the scientific results.