I'm working on a project which is barely more than a fancy slide show, changing an image on a plane every few seconds.
The issue is that every time I render an animation, it does it frame by frame, repeating the same renders over and over again until the "slide" changes.
What I'm searching for is a way to opt-in to lazy rendering, where unless there's a known tween in progress, Blender just holds the frame. Does something like this exist, and if not, is there any way to get Blender to skip renders?
EDIT: I found this link (Render optimization when frames are almost the same), but it's not very helpful and relates to similar frames rather than frames which are exactly the same.

I'm going to try your advice, I'll let you know how it works out.
– Seph Reed Sep 17 '17 at 07:16