I have some image file paths that come from a database. The images are located in my /assets folder locally. But none of them load.

In my component my render function is basically

render(){
    return 
}

When I inspect the network tab, the image is always 3.5kb and blank, and status is 200 OK. The path looks correct, ie localhost:1906/assets/book/cover.png.

I have no idea what to do. I followed this tutorial and it doesn't work either. In this case the image loads but is not displayed anywhere. Regardless I cannot use import anyway since the image URI is from a database.

What secret configuration item am I missing to be able to just load images from the assets folder?