I ran into a similar issue, if not the same one. First, tag your image with a specific version. I.e. 'my_iamge:1.0'. Next, you may need to add an explicit 'imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent' directly under the image reference for the container. Kubernetes will automatically change the pull policy to 'Always' if the tag is ':latest'. After I did that, Kubernetes running as part of Docker Desktop recognized the image I built in the docker image cache.