MediaRef Cleanup Auditor

MediaRef Cleanup Auditor analyses attachment records, content, metadata, and the uploads filesystem using durable, bounded jobs. It includes exact duplicate hashing, thumbnail analysis, optional live verification, quarantine and restoration, builder and plugin capability reporting, REST workers, and WP-CLI.

There is no paid edition, scan limit, license server, advertising gate or required external service. All processing occurs on the WordPress installation. Donations may support development but do not change functionality.

Safety language is deliberate: “No reference detected” is not proof that an item is unused. Dynamic code, remote consumers and unsupported data stores can create blind spots. Every cleanup attempt performs a fresh targeted reference check and verifies file identity.

Built for large and old media libraries

Scans use database-backed jobs, keyset cursors, adaptive bounded batches, staged publishing, and expiring worker locks. A browser refresh does not erase progress, and the same job can be resumed with WP-CLI. The Storage Explorer groups files by year, month, MIME type, attachment ownership, and derivative type, making sites with upload folders spanning many years easier to review.

Included without feature locks

• Media Library, metadata, options, builder, and filesystem reference analysis.
• Durable uploads manifest with missing, unknown, generated, and orphan-file classification.
• Exact duplicate groups using file size, MIME type, and SHA-256 fingerprints.
• Thumbnail inventory, missing-size analysis, selective cleanup review, and reporting.
• Optional same-origin live-page verification, disabled by default.
• Storage Explorer and Large Image Analyzer with date, folder, dimension, and size filters.
• Protected and ignored media states.
• Identity-checked private quarantine, restoration, and separate permanent deletion.
• REST dashboard workers and the complete wp mediaref-cleanup-auditor WP-CLI command set.
• Individual scanner classes for supported builders, galleries, commerce, LMS, membership, multilingual, cache, and custom-field ecosystems.

There is no Pro edition, image limit, scan limit, remote license validation, or required account.

WP-CLI

Common commands:

Machine-readable result commands support table, JSON, CSV and count formats through WP-CLI.

Security

Live verification is off by default. It accepts only the current site host, resolves and rejects private/reserved IPs, validates every redirect, sends no cookies, limits redirects, response bytes and time, and parses returned text without executing scripts or submitting forms.

Quarantine paths are exact, contained within uploads, and never selected through wildcard matching. Remote objects are never deleted by the bundled local storage adapter.

Privacy

MediaRef Cleanup Auditor stores scan jobs, cursors, normalized media references, file-manifest data, results, operation logs, and quarantine records in this WordPress database. This operational data is used only to perform and audit media analysis and cleanup.

The plugin does not send telemetry or site data to the author. Optional live verification makes unauthenticated requests only to approved URLs belonging to the current site. It does not execute scripts, submit forms, or send administrator cookies.

Support

For support, use the MediaRef Cleanup Auditor support forum on WordPress.org after the plugin is approved. Before reporting a problem, include the WordPress and PHP versions, scan type, job ID, current stage, and the sanitized error shown in MediaRef Cleanup Auditor. Never post private server paths or credentials.