Using CSS transforms, I was able to build a little image previewer. There is only one image for both the thumbnail and full size view. Scale does wonders.
I created this guy in Codepen.io. It seems to be a lot better than just showing all the html/css/js in a post. I would appreciate any comments or possible improvements. I might try to build some sort of template/plugin so that anyone can just plop in their images and BAM it works nicely.