Craft CMS image src error

Good morning,

I have inherited a Craft CMS site from a previous developer, and am running into issues when looking to add images to the site.

Following instructions I grabbed the copy of the SQL database for local use, and am running MySQL and Apache via XAMPP

I added new images to the local file structure (assets/images/) but when I go to the template being used and add the standard <img src="./assets/images/name"> I get an error in the console of 404 http://localhost:3000/assets/images/image.jpg could not be found.
I then tried adding it directly into the same folder with my template code (just to see if I can get it working) but this time I got a 500 server error.

I am completely at a loss now since I never worked with CMS before (am an internal React/Node developer). I hope I explained the issue clearly, would anyone be able to point me in the correct direction?

Many thanks.