Skip to main content
Official Plugin
View plugin on GitHub
See starters using this

gatsby-remark-images-contentful

Processes images in markdown so they can be used in the production build using Contentful’s Image API

In the processing, it makes images responsive by:

  • Adding an elastic container to hold the size of the image while it loads to avoid layout jumps.
  • Generating multiple versions of images at different widths and sets the srcset and sizes of the img element so regardless of the width of the device, the correct image is downloaded.
  • Using the “blur up” technique popularized by Medium and Facebook where a small 20px wide version of the image is shown as a placeholder until the actual image is downloaded.

Install

npm install --save gatsby-remark-images-contentful

How to use

// In your gatsby-config.js
plugins: [
  `gatsby-plugin-sharp`,
  {
    resolve: `gatsby-transformer-remark`,
    options: {
      plugins: [
        {
          resolve: `gatsby-remark-images-contentful`,
          options: {
            // It's important to specify the maxWidth (in pixels) of
            // the content container as this plugin uses this as the
            // base for generating different widths of each image.
            maxWidth: 590,
          },
        },
      ],
    },
  },
]

Options

Name Default Description
maxWidth 650 The maxWidth in pixels of the div where the markdown will be displayed. This value is used when deciding what the width of the various responsive thumbnails should be.
linkImagesToOriginal true Add a link to each image to the original image. Sometimes people want to see a full-sized version of an image e.g. to see extra detail on a part of the image and this is a convenient and common pattern for enabling this. Set this option to false to disable this behavior.
showCaptions false Add a caption to each image with the contents of the title attribute, when this is not empty. Set this option to true to enable this behavior.
sizeByPixelDensity false Analyze images’ pixel density to make decisions about target image size. This is what GitHub is doing when embedding images in tickets. This is a useful setting for documentation pages with a lot of screenshots. It can have unintended side effects on high-pixel density artworks.

Example: A screenshot made on a retina screen with a resolution of 144 (e.g. Macbook) and a width of 100px, will be rendered at 50px.
wrapperStyle Add custom styles to the div wrapping the responsive images. Use regular CSS syntax, e.g. margin-bottom:10px; background: red;
backgroundColor white Set the background color of the image to match the background of your design
withWebp false Additionally generate WebP versions alongside your chosen file format. They are added as a srcset with the appropriate mimetype and will be loaded in browsers that support the format.
loading lazy Set the browser’s native lazy loading attribute. One of lazy, eager or auto.

Troubleshooting

Incompatible library version: sharp.node requires version X or later, but Z provides version Y

This means that there are multiple incompatible versions of the sharp package installed in node_modules. The complete error typically looks like this:

Something went wrong installing the "sharp" module

dlopen(/Users/misiek/dev/gatsby-starter-blog/node_modules/sharp/build/Release/sharp.node, 1): Library not loaded: @rpath/libglib-2.0.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/misiek/dev/gatsby-starter-blog/node_modules/sharp/build/Release/sharp.node
  Reason: Incompatible library version: sharp.node requires version 6001.0.0 or later, but libglib-2.0.dylib provides version 5801.0.0

To fix this, you’ll need to update all Gatsby plugins in the current project that depend on the sharp package. Here’s a list of official plugins that you might need to update in case your projects uses them:

  • gatsby-plugin-sharp
  • gatsby-plugin-manifest
  • gatsby-remark-images-contentful
  • gatsby-source-contentful
  • gatsby-transformer-sharp
  • gatsby-transformer-sqip

To update these packages, run:

npm install gatsby-plugin-sharp gatsby-plugin-manifest gatsby-remark-images-contentful gatsby-source-contentful gatsby-transformer-sharp gatsby-transformer-sqip

If updating these doesn’t fix the issue, your project probably uses other plugins from the community that depend on a different version of sharp. Try running npm list sharp or yarn why sharp to see all packages in the current project that use sharp and try updating them as well.


Edit this page on GitHub
Docs
Tutorials
Plugins
Blog
Showcase