Recursive copy to relative destination paths

Actually it also works with cp, what you want is the --parents flag.

cp --parents `find /path/src  \( -name "*.jpg" -o -name "*.gif" \)` /path/target

In theory -P is synonyms with --parents, but that never worked for me.

You can use rsync for this, e.g.

$ rsync -avm /path/src/ /path/dest/ --include \*/ --include \*.jpg --include \*.gif --exclude \*

Just to clarify the above:

-avm             # recursive, copy attributes etc, verbose, skip empty directories
/path/src/       # source
/path/dest/      # destination (NB: trailing / is important)
--include \*/    # include all directories
--include \*.jpg # include files ending .jpg
--include \*.gif # include files ending .gif
--exclude \*     # exclude all other files