That folder is only meant for static files and there is not even a guarantee to have write access to it during runtime. For images like avatars etc. the typical solutions are S3 or R2 buckets to upload them there and reference them then.

Is there any folder I could use for this use case. The client wants images stored locally and not externally

Is the app self-hosted or on a cloud provider?

The client self hosts on a server

@Giant panda Any idea on how to handle dynamically added self-hosted image files to be available through next/image without restarting the website everytime an image is uploaded

Use an api route that uses fs to read the file manually and send the file manually as response

Gee, I didn't think I'd find someone who had the same idea as me xD, I've just started NextJs and I've had the problem that in production you can't see the new images in the public folder. But I thought of some stuff I was doing with Flask in python and came up with this solution.

haha, need to come up with weird solutions when the situation calls for them

to be fair though i think "read the file with fs, then stream/return it" is pretty much what all these frameworks are also doing behind the scenes