In Salesforce, if you add an image to a PathAssistant, it hard codes the sandbox URL in the metadata. This causes failures when you then try to deploy that item to the next environment. My idea is that a feature is added that would allow some sort of find/replace logic that's applied prior to the CI compare. Something like:
File: Enter the name of the package file
Search Text: The text and/or regex string to search the file for
Replacement Text: The text to replace found the text with

In this way, it would modify the source file prior to the compare and then use the modified version if there are other differences between the two files.

The workaround is to either remove the file from the pacakge.xml or the meta-data filter so it quits breaking the validation, but this only works if you never have to change the code.