Long-term caching for images breaks image loading in the panel

The CMS Questions
1

I’m trying to optimize image caching for my Kirby site (v4) which runs on Nginx with a public/ folder setup. I want to serve images in the frontend (especially those under /media/pages/…) with long-term caching headers, like:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable

The Problem

Since both the frontend and the Panel use the same /media/pages/… URLs, I can’t distinguish between them on the server level (e.g. via Nginx location blocks).

Example Nginx config:

location ~* ^/media/.*\.(jpg|jpeg|png|webp|svg|gif)$ {
    expires 1y;
    add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable";
}

After applying this, images in the Panel stop updating properly, even after uploading a new one — the old cached version is still shown due to browser cache. If I open an image to set a focal point, the request results in an 404 error.

Question

Has anyone solved this in a better or more reliable way (without ugly Nginx workarounds like checking $http_referer)?

Thank you