So after some bumps along the way, I have the Adafruit Serial Jpeg Camera motion detection program working on the esp32. Espressif fixed a few uart bugs and I mainly had to remove references to Software Serial library as it's not supported yet on the esp32. While I brute force commented out Software Serial support, I am sure there is probably a much more elegant way to fake it out for now.

So my next step is to understand how I might use the Watson SDK to allow for photo analysis.