@colesbury and @JuanFMontesinos
Thanks for all your input.  I was worth the ask, but it seems clear that for now I’m stuck with how things are.  I will look into pillow-simd though, and accimage.  The unfortunate part is likely that a for loop is required, as no batch transformations exist (yet).
In case you’re curious, the transformations are meant to recreate real and possible changes in the input data.  ColorJitter is useful as these are stained tissue images, so this replicates different laboratory/scanner settings.  RandomResizedCrop is used to effectively change focal properties and Resize is need to standardized the input resolution.
Thanks for all the input, my questions/hopes are answered!