I had this same issue! I'm not sure if it's the same case as in the original question, but for me jest was still somehow trying to load the images as JS and trying to parse them while I had the files matching image extensions mapped to a mock in moduleNameMapper. My file also included some code to map the @ character to the root src directory, since I had webpack and this was configured as a webpack alias in the project (and in TS). The full moduleNameMapper entry in jest.config.js looked like this for me:
moduleNameMapper: {
'^@$': '<rootDir>/src',
'^@/(.*)':
'<rootDir>/src/$1',
'\\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|eot|otf|webp|svg|ttf|woff|woff2|mp4|webm|wav|mp3|m4a|aac|oga)$':
'<rootDir>/__mocks__/fileMock.js',
// '\\.(css|less)$': '<rootDir>/__mocks__/styleMock.js',
'.*\\.(css|less)$': 'identity-obj-proxy',
}
For me it turned out that when I was importing the images in my components, the path was something like: '@/assets/someImage.jpg'. However, it seems this would match the first regex first, the one covering the @ alias: ^@/(.*). Thus, it was being mapped to <rootDir>/src/$1 instead of the <rootDir>/__mocks__/fileMock.js.
I fixed it by making the alias only match non-images:
moduleNameMapper: {
'^@$': '<rootDir>/src',
'^@/(.*)\\.(?!jpg|jpeg|png|gif|eot|otf|webp|svg|ttf|woff|woff2|mp4|webm|wav|mp3|m4a|aac|oga)$':
'<rootDir>/src/$1',
'.*\\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|eot|otf|webp|svg|ttf|woff|woff2|mp4|webm|wav|mp3|m4a|aac|oga)$':
'<rootDir>/__mocks__/fileMock.js',
// '\\.(css|less)$': '<rootDir>/__mocks__/styleMock.js',
'.*\\.(css|less)$': 'identity-obj-proxy',
}