There is also JPEG View which is really fast and simple image viewer for windows https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview) It is very fast, specially noticeable on very large images. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

JPEGView - lightweight image viewer for Windows. ShareX - screen capture tool with other nice features. Source: about 2 years ago

JPEGView should be close enough to what you want. It's very light-weight. Source: about 2 years ago

JPEGView is great, lightweight and opens stuff fast https://sourceforge.net/projects/jpegview/. Source: about 2 years ago

JPEGView - Lean and fast image viewer with minimal GUI. Source: about 2 years ago

The Unsplash Image API enables limitless API requests, providing developers with the freedom to incorporate images into their apps without speed or quota restrictions. Leveraging Imgix, a sophisticated image processing service, it allows real-time modification of image dimensions and quality directly via URL parameters, facilitating client-side image transformations without extra API calls. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago

I'm not sure if you have budget for this but companies like https://imgix.com/ and https://supabase.com/docs/guides/storage/serving/image-transformations let you do image transforms on the fly through url query params. Most of them can resize, crop, compress, and transform to webp. Source: 6 months ago

I know that imgix.com provides an API for image manipulations. There may be others. Source: over 1 year ago

I use ImgIX for a long time now. Very satisfied. Https://imgix.com. Source: over 1 year ago

I would highly recommend using Imgix as another image CDN. The free tier is insanely generous. Source: over 1 year ago