Can images only be retrieved from /public folder?

[olafmaltha017]

Hi Nuxt Content developers,

I am currently working on a role based access documentation site that has public documents and documents locked behind a user role with a role based access / permission function. I am pulling my markdown files from bitbucket as a zip, these include images but unfortunately image file types are not supported in the collection and I got it working by adding the images to the /public directory but I'm not sure how I can prevent all images in the directory from being accessible to the client automatically.

I am currently querying my content via the queryCollection function in nuxt server directory, and filtering based on roles and then sending them to the client.

Does anyone know of a way how I can have the images load into the rendered markdown pages without exposing them to everyone. Thanks in advance for any tips and advice they are greatly appreciated!

Kind Regards,
Olaf