Google Earth Engine: set band as property without reducing

I have a function that takes an ImageCollection and sets a mean value as a property for another ImageCollection.

var DHW = HS_SSTA_7d.map(function(im) {
                    var res = im.reduceRegion(ee.Reducer.mean(), reefs_500, 500); 
                    // calc mean to be called and set as property
                    return im.set("sst_mean", res.get("sst"))});

I then use this to filter out values great than 1 from my ImageCollection.

 var DHW_non_null = DHW.filter(ee.Filter.notNull(["sst_mean"]))
                    .filterMetadata("sst_mean", "greater_than", 1);

Is there a way of setting the band value as a property without reducing it, so it can be filtered? Basically I want to remove any images/pixels which are great than one. I tried to set the band as a property using the two methods below but it didn’t seem to work.

 var DHW = HS_SSTA_7d.map(function(im) {
                    return im.set("sst_mean", im.get("sst"))});


 var DHW1 = ee.ImageCollection(HS_SSTA_7d_AsAList.map(function(im){
     var sst = ee.Image(im).get('sst');
     return ee.Image(im).set("sst_mean", sst);
     }));

Is the right way of doing things, or is there a way of filtering your data without setting the band values as a property? A link to my full code ishere

var image = ee.Image.constant(1);
print(image.set('foo', image));

var noPixelsGreaterThanOne = collection.map(function (image) {
  return image.updateMask(image.select('sst').lte(1));
});