The tailwind starter blog has out of the box support for Next.js's built-in image component and automatically swaps out default image tags in markdown or mdx documents to use the Image component provided.
To use in a new page route / javascript file, simply import the image component and call it e.g.
import Image from 'next/image'
function Home() {
return (
<>
<h1>My Homepage</h1>
<Image
src="/me.png"
alt="Picture of the author"
width={500} height={500}
/>
<p>Welcome to my homepage!</p>
</>
)
}
export default Home
For a markdown file, the default image tag can be used and the default img
tag gets replaced by the Image
component in the build process.
Assuming we have a file called ocean.jpg
in data/img/ocean.jpg
, the following line of code would generate the optimized image.

Alternatively, since we are using mdx, we can just use the image component directly! Note, that you would have to provide a fixed width and height. The img
tag method parses the dimension automatically.
<Image
alt="ocean"
src="/static/images/ocean.jpg"
width={256} height={128}
/>
Note: If you try to save the image, it is in webp format, if your browser supports it!
Photo by YUCAR FotoGrafik on Unsplash
Due to the reliance of next/image
, unless you are using an external image CDN like Cloudinary or Imgix, it is practically required to use Vercel for hosting. This is because the component acts like a serverless function that calls a highly optimized image CDN.
If you do not want to be tied to Vercel, you can remove imgToJsx
in remarkPlugins
in lib/mdx.js
. This would avoid substituting the default img
tag.
Alternatively, one could wait for image optimization at build time to be supported. A different library, next-optimized-images does that, although it requires transforming the images through webpack which is not done here.
Images from external links are not passed through next/image
All images have to be stored in the public
folder e.g /static/images/ocean.jpeg