Convenient api call to fetch issues data?

We want to use issue/{issue_key}/changelog to fetch the full changelog history. We don’t know issue keys, so we have to call search to get the full issue data set. However, we don’t need many fields from this api. We only need issue id, key, and changelog total count. (We don’t even need changelog history returned in this call.) If the total count on one key is greater than 100, we will call issue/{issue_key}/changelog to fetch the full changelog history for this issue. Is there any better api for us to perform this than calling search ?
Thanks