Delete Attachments

Description

If you've been doing a lot of importing into WordPress, you can sometimes end up with orphan attachments – media items which aren't actually used in any post. This plugin deletes orphan attachments, along with their metadata and media files.

See https://neliosoftware.com/blog/how-to-remove-unused-images-from-your-media-library-in-wordpress/ for more info about the query this plugin uses to detect orphan attachments.

The plugin assumes you haven't changed your site's URL after you created the attachments – i.e., that each attachment's guid is its URL. Check the posts of type attachment in your wp_posts table if you're not sure.

Warning

You won't be able to retrieve the deleted attachments or their media files afterwards, so back up your database and media files before you do a deletion.

WP-Cron

To reduce the effect on site performance, this plugin uses WP-Cron scheduled events to delete attachments in batches. The scheduled action tries to delete all the attachments in a batch, then passes the remaining attachment IDs to a new scheduled action. If you're not worried about performance, or don't have many orphan attachments, increase the BATCH_SIZE constant to delete more attachments in one go.

Because we're using WP-Cron events, the deletion won't start straight away – please allow some time for it to start. By default, WP-Cron only does scheduled actions when someone views a page on the WordPress site. See https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/cron/ for more details. Also check out Cron Control, a good plugin which lets you see which cron jobs are scheduled, and run them sooner.

Installation

1. Download the latest version of the plugin here.
2. Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload administration screen on your WordPress site
3. Select the ZIP file you just downloaded
4. Click Install Now
5. Click Activate
6. Go to Tools > Delete Attachments to use the plugin.

Log file

The plugin will output the results of deletion in a log file with a name like delete-attachments-[YYYY-mm-dd] in your wp-content folder.

Changelog

1.0.0

• Initial release

1.0.1

• Added note about log file.

1.0.2

• Changed installation instructions.

Screenshots