I had similar experience when using free tier of Heroku
Applications that use the free dyno type will sleep. When a sleeping application receives HTTP traffic, it will be awakened - causing a delay of a few seconds. Using one of the other dyno types will avoid sleeping. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku-works#dyno-manager
Also try to lower the image file size as it shouldnt be that big anyway to display in a small screen?