i don't see why you need to do that though, if you put the image inside public then it will be accessible at the path to the image, regardless of whether it's imported or not

if you have public/image.png, then you can always access it at /image.png whether or not you import it anywhere

@joulev Hey Joulev, that is not the case when performing a build. Once built if an image isn't imported then it isn't included in the build and the build is what exists at runtime in the docker container, not the source public folder.

oh i see what you mean, i've always assumed that the public directory is handled by the build process but it turns out it isn't. there are now a few ways to go:
* modify the docker configuration to copy the public directory over as well, before running next start
* import the image anyway, import "./path/to/image.png";, even when you don't need it
the second way requires you to find a way to know the image url though because it won't be a nice url but something like this /_next/static/media/image.79ffbedc.png

I ended up importing it into a component and hiding it so it never loads for the end-user, lol