Help with deletion of orphaned material from the Library

  • Unknown's avatar
    eaaa01 · Member ·

    Dear WordPress

    I look after the website of a Community Council in Edinburgh, Scotland.

    Much of the material (mainly pdfs) I put in our Library is soon out of date and becomes redundant when the pages are updated. Keeping the Library tidy by deleting such material is tedious and carries the danger of deleting stuff which is still referenced. And, even though it is ‘unattached’ after reference to it has been deleted, it is not recognised as such.

    Please could you provide a plug-in the identify such material? Or am I being stupid?

    Good wishes, Peter Schwarz

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    I look after the website of a Community Council in Edinburgh, Scotland.

    Is this the URL of that site http://libertondcc.wordpress.com/?

    if you are referring to a WordPress.COM hosted blog then type modlook into the sidebar tags on this thread for Staff to clear the media cache for you.

    How do I get a Moderator/Staff reply for my question? https://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-help-in-the-forums/#how-do-i-get-a-moderatorstaff-reply-for-my-question Then please subscribe to this thread so you are notified when they respond. To subscribe look in the sidebar of this thread, find the subscribe to topics link and click it.

  • Unknown's avatar
    eaaa01 · Member ·

    Dear timethief

    Many thanks. Yes that is my wordpress.com site.

    But I only want to clear those things in the media library which are no longer referenced on the pages. I try to catch and delete most of them when I delete text on the pages, but I miss some. It’s not a great worry now as I am using only about 10% of my space, but I don’t like leaving unreferenced stuff in the library for my successor. Google did seem to mention a plug-in that does this job (removing stuff no longer referenced stuff from the Library) on wordpress.org?

    Our site is not really a blog site — only one page permits comments.

    I don’t understand your last paragraph. Sorry, I’m an 88 year old, although around 1980 I was the guru in our office in the Edinburgh Uni Science Faculty, having done a 1st year computing course when I was Vice Dean of Science. But I’m not familiar with blogging netiquette, so forgive me. eaaa01 was my user name in 1980 on the Edinburgh Multiaccess mainframe, a multiaccess pioneer I believe..

    Thanks again and good wishes, Peter

  • staff-ozmodiar · Staff ·

    I’m afraid there is no automatic way to clear Media Library items that are not being used. You will need to do that manually.

  • Unknown's avatar
    eaaa01 · Member ·

    Thank you, rootjosh, though that’s bad news.

    I wondered whether wordpress.com could provide something as in
    https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/dnui-delete-not-used-image-wordpress?filter=5
    though this seems to delete all images (which would be disastrous for me).

    It would be great even just to have a way of checking whether an item in the library is still referenced in the pages. As it is I have found that if I transfer text referencing a media item from one page to another (or remove it altogether), the library still records the original page to which is was attached.

    Thanks again and good wishes from the Edinburgh Festival,

    Peter

  • staff-ozmodiar · Staff ·

    You could always look into moving to a self-hosted WordPress.org site if the functionality is crucial to your site plans. That’s one of the advantages of WordPress.org, the expandability through plugins.

    WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

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