I have been using a static site generator where the content is managed in git version control for this site for a number of years.

A decision I punted on really understanding when I was trying to figure how to get the darned thing working was how to handle static assets (images, mostly). To “get it working” I decided to commit the assets to the repository.

Fast-forward to the present: I was unable to deploy my site because the image copying was exceeding the processing limits on my web server.

I needed to trim the footprint of my git repository. Ultimately I reduced the footprint by 100x. Here are the tools I used to handle the problem.