We have marked this change as breaking, but it will not disrupt your site when you update. It is classified as a breaking change to ensure you're aware of the altered behaviour starting from version 16.1.

Previous Behaviour (Before 16.1)

Previously, images exceeding the 25MB limit were still served via the Image API at their original size. This often led to performance issues, as large images were scaled down using CSS or by setting width and height attributes, without authors realizing they were serving oversized files that negatively impacted page load times.

New Behaviour (From 16.1 Onwards)

From version 16.1, if an image exceeds the 25MB limit and is processed by the Image API, a 500 error will be returned, resulting in a broken image. This change makes it immediately clear when an oversized image is present.

To help prevent this issue, we have introduced a validation on image fields:

If image transformations are specified in an entry field, images over 25MB will now be rejected, and the author will receive a message indicating that the image is too large.

This validation ensures that oversized images are not used when transformations are required, helping authors choose images that load quickly and work seamlessly with the Image API.