Gatsby Image, along with gatsby-transformer-sharp and gatsby-plugin-sharp, is a common way to handle images in a Gatsby project.  It gives us the power to process source images at build time to create a ‘srcSet‘ for  ‘‘ or ‘‘ tags, or create versions in grayscale, duotone, cropped, rotated, etc.

When Gatsby builds from a Drupal source, it downloads the source images and processes them to create these image variations which are stored in the public directory. The ability to optimize and art-direct images at build time is great, but build performance suffers while these assets are generated. As a site grows in images, the time it takes to build grows as well. Image processing can take hours, while the rest of the build takes mere minutes.