fbi, a frame-buffer image viewer, might do the trick for you.
Otherwise, you could try JPEG to ASCII for a rough viewing of JPEG images.
Question
does anyone know of a way to just display an image via command line or C? I can run video fine without running X with omxplayer but i would like to also display an image without having to load the desktop, either via C or something i can run from the shell
Solution 2
fbi, a frame-buffer image viewer, might do the trick for you.
Otherwise, you could try JPEG to ASCII for a rough viewing of JPEG images.
OTHER TIPS
SVGAlib might be what you're looking for - a C graphics library that works without X11.