Cleaning ‘orphan’ uploaded files

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  oninthough · Member · Nov 19, 2007 at 1:43 pm

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  In my blog there are many images, unused or duplicates, uploaded during the early naive months of blogging. Let me call them ‘orphan’ files since they are not linked to any post as such. Many header images are also there tested for different themes (they pop up once I try that theme again). The duplicates are creating more problems, since I cannot understand which of them are used.
  To be more precise, is there any way to understand if an uploaded file is ‘used/linked’ or not? So that I can clean them safely without damaging a post?
  Thanks in advance.

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  sundrop74 · Member · Nov 19, 2007 at 1:50 pm

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  I don’t know of any easy way, but I think having that information for each file would be a great feature.

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  oninthough · Member · Nov 19, 2007 at 2:38 pm

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  I am still not sure, but I think I have got the answer. After we click for the file properties of an uploaded image/file, we get a link for associated ‘links’ to the file. A careful study is showing that the third sort of links to a linked file – Thumbnail linked to page (the other two being the ‘url’ to the file and ‘Thumbnail linked to file’) – is different from an ‘orphan/unlinked’ file (unused or the post in which it is used is deleted).
  The used files have a date and post url appended to it, i.e here the post is part of the link-path. The unused images/files lack them and has an ‘?attachment_id’ just after the blog url.
  I will delete some of these files of the second sort to check.