Is it possible to use post featured image from the static folder?

[ViniciusMenezesDev]

Hi, everyone! I'm new to Hugo and I'm migrating a blog from Jekyll (website, source) to Hugo (website, source). I'm also moving from GitLab to GitHub, moving domain, etc. but that's not the problem.

I liked the Stack very much (I saw it in action here and here), but the Beautiful Hugo theme seems to work better overall with less effort.

I have a problem with post featured images (I'm not sure they are called this way on Hugo). All my posts have featured images defined in the front matter:

• content/post/2026-01-30-como-configurar-a-frequencia-do-ponto-de-acesso-wi-fi-para-reduzir-a-interferencia-e-melhorar-o-sinal-parte-2-faixa-de-5-ghz.md

---
date: "2026-01-30T20:05:00Z"
image: /files/2026/01/wifi-analyzer.jpg
title: 'Como configurar a frequência do ponto de acesso Wi-Fi para reduzir a interferência e melhorar o sinal - parte 2: faixa de 5 GHz'
---

Vimos na [parte 1] deste artigo os diferentes tipos de ondas de rádio existentes, como evoluíram os padrões de Wi-Fi, as faixas de frequências usadas por esses padrões e como analisar o uso do espectro na vizinhança usando o aplicativo [WiFiAnalyzer] para [Android] e o WinBox, que é o utilitário de configuração do roteador [MikroTik]. Começamos nossa análise e configuração pela faixa de 2,4 GHz e agora na parte 2 vamos analisar e configurar a faixa de 5 GHz.

...

Beautiful Hugo correctly displays it in the post listing (index) page:

But Stack doest not:

I tried debugging the theme and I have the impression that layouts/_partials/helper/image.html should be called but it never is.

Please note that the image is stored in the static folder (so, static/files/2026/01/wifi-analyzer.jpg).

If I use a page bundle it works:

content/post/
├── test/
│   └── wifi-analyzer.jpg
└── test.md

• test.md

---
date: "2026-01-30T20:05:00Z"
image: wifi-analyzer.jpg
...

But that solution would require me to review all of my posts and file hierarchy, I really don't want to go that way, especially because with Beautiful Hugo it simply works as is, I believe there has to be some way to make it work with Stack as well.

Could you please help me getting that to work with the Stack theme? (use post featured image from the static folder)

[ViniciusMenezesDev]

Here is what I did to address this issue:

• ViniciusMenezesDev/viniciusmenezesdev.github.io@f917adc - use post featured image from the static folder (but breaking images from page bundles)
• ViniciusMenezesDev/viniciusmenezesdev.github.io@17d8e89 - bring back compatibility with images from page bundles

[CaiJimmy]

Glad that you find a solution for it.

I have pushed a fix for this. Because Hugo does not support image handling for images placed in static folder, these images cannot use features like lightbox (because theme cannot get their size at compile time)