Can I upload a photo to Photon, then delete the page?

Hi there,

Yes, even if you delete the page, images are cached “forever” as we mention here:

https://jetpack.com/support/site-accelerator/

That’s awesome, thanks!

Is it okay to refer to it as https://i0.wp.com/www.thenerdystudent.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/tnsmobileheader.png without the URL decoration at the end?

You can, the query string at the end just determines a number of parameters, like the size of the image that should be loaded.

If you use just that, it will be the full original image.