Vanishing Large Media?

My site is epic-bose-28a69b

I’ve had relentless issues with large media, in part from misunderstanding the setup process the first time, but after starting over with a clean repo and new app, I was eventually able to get all my files pushed and visible from the deployed app!

… Until yesterday. Now they’ve reverted to the busted “netpack base64 encoded a git lfs pointer file” behavior – where they get checked out as git lfs pointers, netpack realizes they’re tiny and inlines them as data, but a git lfs file isn’t a valid jpg so it gives an error during rendering

And to doublecheck that I wasn’t crazy, I checked my Large Media settings and grabbed a URL – https://epic-bose-28a69b.netlify.app/img/selfsacrifice.e60bb32e.jpeg – and got a 404. Yep, my large media was gone. Then, because I wanted to triple-check that I had the URL scheme right and that 404 wasn’t because I missed something, I pushed a change to turn off webpack’s url-loader for images

I refreshed my site, and everything was there! I hit “View Image” on one, and my URL scheme from before was correct. I went back to the tab that I’d used to open selfsacrifice there, and now the picture loaded just fine!?

What happened, and how can I keep it from happening again?

Hi, @kbro. I think you answered your own question:

This is covered in the limitations section of the Large Media documentation, quoting:

  • Files tracked with Large Media are uploaded directly to the Netlify Large Media storage service on push, completely bypassing the site build. This saves build time, but also means that the files are not available to tools that process asset files during the build, such as Hugo’s image processing or the gatsby-image plugin. Depending on your needs, you may be able to replace this functionality with Netlify’s image transformation service.

In other words, the change above caused your site’s build process to now base64 encode the images. You will need to disable that behavior as it isn’t possible to do any processing of the image data during the site build. I’m not sure what to tell you to do differently though as I don’t know much at all about your site’s build process.

Note, this isn’t a limitation of Git LFS and Netlify, just Large Media itself. If you want to use Git LFS and the Git host’s Git LFS service, you can do build time processing of the raw data.

If there are other questions about this, please let us know.

Aha! I’m very much a beginner to all of this, and the Vue tutorial I followed simply included webpack as a best practice. Thanks!