So with all the reddit alternative discussions and talk about small scale applications, I thougt about

what's the best way to host images and videos in a low disk space environment?

I'm thinking of the hobbyist, small network, federated thingies etc.

A nginx module maybe that could track incoming requests to media files and mark them with their latest access time. If the image or video wasn't accessed for a couple of weeks or months, it'll be deleted. If that's a feasible thing to do for a nginx, or other webserver module. Maybe just scraping and checking the access logs would be enough. Every webserver would probably have some kind of access log anyway.

Or would it only be sensible to bake that functionality into the app? But how would I keep track of external, direct visits to the media files or a shared link somewhere else, that wasn't clicked from the app interface? I feel like external visits should be accounted for as well.

Was wondering what some of you would come up with.