Thank you for your excellent insight. I will try to wrap up my concrete direction on displays given our discussion and request a little more guidance as far as the software side, as this is where our discussion started. While I am interested in using the new devices 
I do want to keep making progress for now with the Photon
Display will be using either LCD or OLED (I prefer OLED but from our discussion I am guessing that LCD is more common and that I should perhaps go in that direction), require an SD card for this version, and use a display “unit” (as opposed to raw display)
Adafruit 1.8 Color TFT [https://www.adafruit.com/product/358] is what I started with, the 1.8 inch version of what you recommended, [https://www.adafruit.com/product/3787] - might be best to use one of these LCD screens due to:
-SD card
-LCD implementation (might be easier than OLED?)
The only obvious alternative would be the display used in this thread, [Adafruit OLED Breakout Board - 16-bit Color 1.5" w/microSD holder] or other similar OLED + SD card displays
Other than that, from a software standpoint, to my novice understanding I2C appears easier to implement (thread I successfully followed and was able to get it to work using: Adafruit SSD1306 [SOLVED]) however I2C with photon does not appear to have bitmap support? Or at least I haven’t been able to find examples of it.
This post we are in now specifically targets image displaying through SPI so I know for a fact that images through SPI on Photon is possible I just haven’t managed to do it myself. There is an interesting webhooks implementation that I’m not sure would be worth considering (https://www.hackster.io/weatherornot/photon-weather-display-cb8a90)
In any case, beyond the display itself, it appears I am trying to find any advice regarding the best (easiest / most utility surrounding use of images or groups of images / most photon-centric) implementation guide for getting images onto a display (with SD card) using the Photon. If you or anyone has any more insight on any particular guide/section within this thread or around the internet that might help me use images successfully on the Photon, I would appreciate it. Also would be interested in anything from the Arduino world and other similar platforms that might help me but as I’m still a beginner most likely Particle specific guides would be more appropriate.
If my suspicion (that this is the most in-depth forum post on this exact topic on the internet) is correct, then I can simply proceed to try again with the exact implementation that is discussed in this thread (or one of its variations) and then post the debugger output and see if I can get further guidance.
Alternatively it seems like trying out an LCD display implementation (as the one you provided) might be another logical choice, but not sure if that is more supported than OLED.
Thanks again for your insight and invite any further comments/questions/advice but I do recognize that there is a certain level of self-education and testing I will need to do “figure it out myself” so I will do my best to try and get something working and go from there!