htaccess: cache all images but exclude caching images from subfolder

Question

I want to cache all images for 1 month and it works great but the problem is when I try to exclude a subdirectory from caching.

So there are images on:

/ (base dir)
/IMG/
/IMG/folder/
IMG/BIG/

so all images need to be cached, but i want to make it to not cache images that are on IMG/BIG/ folder

<IfModule mod_expires.c>  
  ExpiresActive on

  ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
  ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
</IfModule>  

the above code works but when

i try this code to exclude /IMG/BIG then it doesn't work

<Directory "/IMG/BIG">

<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|png)$">
    <IfModule mod_expires.c>
        ExpiresActive Off
    </IfModule>
    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
        Header set Cache-Control "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
        Header set Pragma "no-cache"
        Header set Expires 0
    </IfModule>
</FilesMatch>
</Directory>

I want to fix this in the .htaccess that is in the root folder and not by adding another .htaccess inside /IMG/big folder

Answer 1

ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"

Aside: The correct mime-type for JPEG files is image/jpeg, not image/jpg, so the above probably isn't doing anything.

The <Directory> directive is not permitted in .htaccess - this should have resulted in a 500 Internal Server Error (the details of which would be in your server's error log).

The <IfModule> wrappers are not required, unless you intend to use the same config on multiple servers where mod_expires and/or mod_headers are not enabled (unlikely).

To target everything else except the /IMG/BIG subdirectory then you can use an <If> expression and check against the REQUEST_URI server variable with a negated regex (!~ operator). For example:

<If "%{REQUEST_URI} !~ m#^/IMG/BIG/#">
  ExpiresActive on
  ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
</If>

To specifically override any headers for requests to /IMG/BIG/ then you could add an <Else> directive:

<Else>
    <FilesMatch "\.(jpg|png)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
        Header set Pragma "no-cache"
        Header set Expires 0
    </FilesMatch>
</Else>

Unless there are other file types in the /IMG/BIG/ directory that you might want cached then you could remove the <FilesMatch> container.