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I'm not sure how common or rare this is, but the visual images I recall are stunningly lacking in detail. For example, in the case of people, even with someone I know very well, it is rare for me to be able to report so much as their hair color on the basis of the mental image I call up when I try to think of them. I don't seem to have any unusual difficulty recognizing people, or any tendency to confuse my various mental images with one another, and the mental images don't seem incomplete until I start thinking about questions like how to describe them. I'm sure I would be completely useless to a police sketch artist if I were ever a witness to a crime.
I don't know if this is fair, because it's not me, but a family member of mine credibly claims to have no conscious visual memory. For example, when she drives down a highway which she has driven many times before, she doesn't automatically recognize the different parts of the highway as I do, without effort; she has to remember specific facts about where things are (like, I take exit 102 to get to place X, which is after a radio tower and then a curve) and then apply those facts to know where she is. She cannot picture her house in her head; she recognizes it by remembering salient features of its exterior. In contrast, her semantic memory and general cognitive ability is exceptional.
Some tasks, like playing games or solving problems that lean on visual and spatial imagination (e.g. the IQ test problems where you fold shapes up) are very difficult for her, although some of those can also be hacked around by remembering relationships (the dot is on the side clockwise from the square, etc.) According to her, she didn't even realize that other people had this capability in a different way until she was college-age or so.
Personally, I have what I think is above-average visual and spatial imagery -- I play chess and see the pieces moving in my head, I read fiction and imagine the settings and characters, and so on. I guess it takes all sorts.