Cache external resources (e.g. images)

[mwip]

When I open News, the browser/android client connects to all the sites accessing external content like images. From a privacy or data avoidance standpoint, one could consider this a unwanted effect. Is there any chance to cache external data in the database while scraping?

[Grotax]

By principle I agree with the target but it's probably not easy to implement this.

News currently parses the RSS/Atom feed some feeds will contain pictures encoded as base64 but of course most feeds will reference a picture via a links.

News doesn't touch these, this feature would require news to search the feeds items content for image links.

Then attempt to download them and strore them somehow, I'm not sure if it would be smart to literally store them in the DB or encode them with base64 to put them directly in the feed.

Then for every linked image news would need to change the reference to maybe something like https://your.nextcloud.cloud/index.php/news/API/image/$id

Also what about multiple users with the same feed currently if you have 10 users with the xyz feed news will store the feed 10 times in the DB and does "10" requests.
I assume we really only want to download a picture only once in most cases.
But when can you delete an image, only when all items that reference this image got deleted.

So much regarding a rough picture.
I think it could be done but it's not an easy job and with major side effects depending on how you implement it.

The clients and the android client has this already could also simply not load the images.