Warping images with clipping masks

In a similar approach, I've gotten it to work with rasterizing if you add a background of the same color as the background in your image. Make the rectangle behind the clipped images. Select it and the clipped images and rasterize. Select the rasterized result and add a stroke of the same color as the background. You might need to increase the size of the stroke if you see any white after warping. Then apply the warp.

I may have a solution if you want to don't want to make a symbol. After you've used your rectangles to clip the images, make a new rectangle to go behind all of the clipped images. Make this rectangle the same color you use for your background. Group the clipped images and this rectangle and then apply the warp.

Have you tried embedding your images and applying envelopes either to each or after grouping them? You might get somewhere with warp envelopes or mesh envelopes if you need to customize the warp.

I did some testing, and here's what I did to make it work. I arranged some Adobe Stock images and embedded them. I made rounded rectangles for each image so that I could make sure the clipping was being applied. I grouped all the images, grouped all the rounded rectangles, and made the clipping mask. If I tried to apply a warp to that result, it didn't work. So I turned the result into a symbol. Then I could apply the warp. In my first try, I got the white edges, too. To fix that, I redid the rounded rectangles to be slightly smaller than the images.