Auto pruning feature of Quay is very helpful to maintain repositories so that only certain tags can be kept in the repository - based on age or count. With 3.11, this feature can also specialized at repository level.

At customer environments when an image is pushed, they might be tagged with commit-ids and or environment indicators (if the image repo holds images for multiple environments: i.e. test, qa). In order to use auto-pruning feature effectively, repositories might be separated per environment. Even if the image repositories are separated, pipelines might have to handle promotion correctly. For example, pipeline must copy the image to the corresponding repository only after promoting it to the new environment and if application can't be promoted tags might have to be deleted. Additionally if the copying of image is delayed to the pipeline of the corresponding environment, git based flows such as pull requests can't be used effectively. 

The existing auto pruning feature can be enhanced to allow for sticky or untouchable tags. This can be defined at organization level (which might be applicable to all repositories under that namespace) and might be overridden at repository level.

If the repository is configured to have sticky tags, auto pruning might not delete those tags and the tags that are pointing to the same image manifest (and will keep the signature and the attestation of the image if exists). With this feature in-place, managing a single image repository for multiple environments will be easier.