Getting a file into S3 is only half the job. Sooner or later you need to actually show that image back to the user — on a profile page, in a gallery, inside a product card — and that's where a second wave of questions shows up. Do you just paste the S3 URL into an <img> tag? Does next/image even work with S3? What if the file is private and shouldn't be reachable by just anyone with the link?
If you followed our guide on uploading files to S3 with Next.js 16, you already have files living in one of three ways — proxied through your server, uploaded directly via a presigned URL, or pushed up in multipart chunks. The good news: how you display an image doesn't depend on how it was uploaded. It depends on one thing only — is the object public or private?
In this guide, you'll learn all three real-world patterns for displaying S3 images in Next.js 16:
Public bucket URLs — the simplest option, for non-sensitive assets
Presigned GET URLs — for private files that only the right user should see
