# Cache key configuration for images

By default, smoxy uses a combination of the host, the URI, and a language cookie as the cache key. This means the same image served from different domains (e.g. `de.shop.com/logo.png` and `en.shop.com/logo.png`) creates separate cache entries — even though it's the exact same file.

For shops that use different domains per language, this wastes cache space and slows down cache warm-up.

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### The Fix: Use URI-Only Cache Keys for Images

By changing the cache key for image URLs to use only the URI, all language shops share the same image cache. Benefits:

* **Faster cache warm-up** — an image cached for the German shop is immediately available for the English shop
* **Simpler invalidation** — one purge request clears the image across all shops instead of one request per domain

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### How to Set It Up

Create a Conditional Rule that matches image URLs and overrides the cache key:

1. Navigate to **Rules > Conditional Rules**
2. Create a new rule
3. Set the **condition** to match image URLs using a regex, for example:

   ```
   /.+\.(png|jpeg|jpg|gif|webp|avif)$
   ```
4. In the rule's settings, set **Cache Key** to `uri`
5. Save the rule

This ensures that image requests are cached by their path only, regardless of which hostname served them.