Galera Fresh Produce

This has nothing to do with inventory — it's specifically about how product images are delivered to your device.

When a product image is uploaded or changed, it doesn't instantly appear everywhere. Here's why:

How images reach your screen (in order):

1. Cloud Storage — The image file lives here. This is the "source of truth."

2. CDN (Content Delivery Network) — A global network that sits in front of the storage and delivers images quickly to users. It keeps a temporary copy (cache) of each image so it doesn't have to fetch from storage every single time.

3. Search Index (Algolia) — Our search and product listing service needs to be notified of the new image. This sync can take up to 5 minutes.

4. Your Device — Phones and browsers also save a local copy of recently viewed images to load them faster next time.

So when an image is updated, there are three layers of delay:

Up to 5 minutes for the product catalog (Algolia) to reflect the change

Up to 1 minute for the CDN cache to expire and fetch the fresh image (recently reduced from 1 day)

Additional time for the device's own cache to clear

In total, after an image is updated, it may take anywhere from a few minutes to longer (depending on the device) before every user sees the new image. This is completely normal behavior for any image-heavy platform — the caching at each layer is intentional, as it's what makes images load so fast in the first place.

If we tell the CDN and user devices not to cache images, every single time a user opens a product page or scrolls through a list, their device would have to download the full images from the original storage all over again. The app would become incredibly slow, consume significantly more data, and feel sluggish. The caching at each layer is intentional—it's what makes the platform fast and responsive.

But we traded some performance with 1 min caching in CDN for now