Reducing next/image Usage After Re-deployment on Vercel Free Plan

[hzoong]

I have a Next.js project deployed on Vercel using the free plan. In this project, I display images obtained from an open API using next/image. Since these images rarely change, I set a very long cache duration to ensure that visitors see the cached images, thus minimizing the impact on the 1000 monthly requests limit provided by the free plan.

However, after redeploying the project, the initial visitors are triggering new requests to fetch and display the images, which increases the usage count for next/image.

Is there a way to prevent the next/image usage from increasing even after the project is redeployed, so that cached images continue to be served without additional requests?