On file size
You need to deal with the vast array of issues that come from the sheer size of images - whether compressed or not, images range from hundreds of KBs and up - which is tens to hundreds times larger than the typical amount of data your frontend/backend handles per operation.
Therefore, the first strategy is to focus on reducing the image size. Don't bother with techniques that only improve a few percents - to make things improve, you need an order of magnitude better compression.
The best file-size-reduction approach is to scale down the image - as much as you can without making your users angry.
If you use JPEG or WebP (or some other lossy formats) you can try use different quality level. Sometimes the best trade-off is obtained from a combination of scaling down and adjusting quality level. Don't limit your scale-down factors to powers-of-two.
The second best image compression approach depends on the type of image content. You will need to learn about the basics of compressed image formats, and be creative applying those basics.
In one very simple approach, large areas of uniform color is simply cropped away from the image, and replaced with a background color - to be painted by the app - using the same RGB hex.
On versioning
The backend database needs to be able to serve a checksum, timestamp (last modified time) or file version number that serves to inform the app whether they have the most up-to-date file.
On keeping the user from boredom
You might need to show small, fast-to-download thumbnails (which are scaled down versions of the image) just in case your app users are quick-tempered. Make sure these thumbnails are properly cached by the backend - loading the thumbnails from disk adds to the latency, which defeats the purpose.
On backend image processing
It looks like the prevailing advice on Programmers.StackExchange is to keep a queue of image processing operations to be performed; the queue to be executed by an out-of-process ImageMagick worker process; results are added back to another "finished queue" to be handled by the backend.
