Feature Request: Skip / Speedup Image Generation Processes

Summary

i would like to skip the step of creating image thumbnails and create “fake” thumbnails.

Basic example

• i set some option to skip the thumbnail creation / image processing

• it creates “Fake” imagesets, and i can query all sharp image options from GraphQL, but it always return the original image without changes

• i don’t remember if there was planned an api for different image manipulation providers (image sharp, external services, lambda functions, gatsby cloud) - but then it can set up with a fake image service…

Motivation

• i running the gatsby develop command in the gatsby doc site.
• in some times something needs to run gatsby clean and the thumbnails are not cached anymore and it needs recreated
• in most times i do not care of the image quality while developing

Times:

1943.298 s 2678/4226 63% Generating image thumbnails

success run page queries - 1329.928s - 4622/4622 3.48/s
success Generating image thumbnails - 2196.493s - 4226/4226 1.92/s

about 36min 😦

[josephmarkus]

Looks like I created a duplicate here - https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues/25827

There’s a bunch of options I considered for a project I work on.

I think there’s two ideas that are worth pointing out:

1. Add a plugin option to gatsby-plugin-sharp to return original image src without doing the time consuming resizing when in development. This way my earlier mentioned GraphQL would still work, but every value would be the same unresized image src. It’s a sort of by-pass without breaking the application.

It could look something like this:

plugins: [
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-plugin-sharp`,
    options: {
      skipProcessing: process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production'
    },
  },
]

1. As suggested by @polarathene - have separate cache for images, so it doesn’t get flushed with every update in package.json/yarn.lock and/or gatsby-config

[afladmark]

This a major problem for one project I’m working on. Every time I add or update an unrelated NPM package Gatsby blows away the image cache and I can’t work for 2 hours (yes, literally, and on an 8 core i9 CPU) while it regenerates 80k image thumbnails. It’s brutal. Our Gatsby Cloud builds can do it in about ~45 minutes by comparison.

For this use case, I can think of two approaches to mitigate this:

1. Make the cache more resilient/reusable. Can we narrow down what changes necessitate blowing away the image cache?

2. In ‘develop’ mode, could these be generated lazily at the point of need/access? Generating 80k images upfront that I almost certainly don’t even need makes working with Gatsby locally incredibly painful.