Hello!

I'd like to cache images (order of hundreds) from a remote location (not all the time mapped as drive, download speed and amount of data are also the factors). 

\usepath[dirfile://./resources/**] is likely for speeding up searching not downloading and I don't know when new images are available (when to delete dirlist.* files), as described in workflows-mkiv.pdf.

Looks like the cache parameter in \externalfigure is used only if some conversion is going on.

I could create a conversion which does nothing or only envelopes JPG in PDF as <id>.jpg.pdf (loading could be faster) and then:

if cached file exists
        use cached <id>.jpg.pdf
    else
    if drive is mapped
        download, convert and cache <id>.jpg
    else
        skip file
    end
end

The source file with one <id> will never change or I could re-cache from time to time to have up-to-date images cached.

Before reinventing the wheel: isn't such functionality or part of it already available?

Thanks,
Jano