I've been trying a fourth option but some input on its validity would be useful. When creating the swapchain the images are in VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_UNDEFINED , which to me seems to indicate that they're all available to the application because they need VK_IMAGE_LAYOUT_PRESENT_SRC_KHR for presentation and so shouldn't be displayed or in queue. I didn't find anything in the spec that would guarantee this however.

The spec says that we can acquire multiple images from the swapchain if we want:

If a swapchain has enough presentable images, applications can acquire multiple images without an intervening vkQueuePresentKHR. Applications can present images in a different order than the order in which they were acquired.

Using the conclusion above I just called vkAcquireNextImageKHR to get every image of the swapchain and changed layout on all of them at once. After that I presented all of them to get them into the system so to speak.

It seems to work in the sense that all images are handed to me by the swapchain, but then again, I found no guarantee that all of them can actually be acquired immediately after creating the swapchain.