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A couple thoughts I have on the matter, because I've gone down this road many times and it's a critical part of a website.

1. You don't have to load all images on page load - if you want to show large images you can ajax load them after the page so it doesn't affect page speed times
2. Large images can be optimized as well. I have some photos that are quite large and we can hit 150-200kB file sizes still, which is quite reasonable. Maintain a mid-range size for mobile devices.
3. I take issue with sites that store a properly sized and quality photo, but make it impossible to view it. For example:
   http://www.toyota-town.com/used/Buick/2007-Buick-Allure-48d98f0a0a0a001f072645c7fca85f38.htm  see how big you can make the photo. Now look how big the photo really is: http://pictures.dealer.com/t/toyotatownltdtc/0895/52d860a00a0e0acc2af6861861a898ee.jpg
   They're loading that large photos, wasting all that bandwidth, and not letting anyone view it properly.
   I've said it before (and taken crap for it) and I'll say it again - there's no sense in having great photos if they can't be bigger than a polaroid.
4. AWS can help and there's certainly some logic behind it, but typically speaking an AWS option or other CDN benefits most when used on assets that the same person will see multiple times. There's a few good studies out there I'll try and dig up, but as a nation wide provider you may be better off tracing nodes and putting clients on the node nearest to their dealership (and therefore their customers), as distance is often the biggest bottleneck for non-reusable assets. There are also great caching options and other optimization features, but AWS works well when it's setup properly. It really depends on how your setup - personally I host all my images on the same server as the website and put each client on the server closest to their home market - the images will never meet any sort of high demand and the server never has to scale because I don't have every dealership on the same server. This design negates much of the value of AWS, but with a load balancer and single cluster setup it has it's benefits.

At one point in time we added a magnifying glass as an overlay on some images - if you clicked it you would go from the large photo to the original. It would only load this photo if you clicked that link, so it had no impact on page load times. Certainly not everyone used it, but according to the Google Analytics goals it was used fairly often by those with larger resolutions. Currently, our average ranges from 30-35% of users using screens that are 1080p or greater - small photos look miserable on large resolutions.