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If you're keeping that many docker images around you have other problems to worry about.

It's usually a shorthand reference to figure out what commit your image is built from. Unless you're implying something else

I generally use the build number from ci for the tag, and add the git commit and repo URL as a label/annotation (following https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec/blob/main/annot...)

You can have two colliding short hashes in a row.

You can have two colliding full length hashes in a row, too. It's just not very likely.

7-8 character shorthashes are perfectly reasonable for tracking a few thousand objects without much chance of collision. There's a tradeoff between the uniqueness guarantee and the friendliness if humans ever need to see the identifier.

Of course, sequential identifiers can be even shorter and friendlier, but they are more troublesome in several ways than hash-derived ones.

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