Deleted images from Media Library remain in Uploads folder

  • Ana

    (@cielvariable)


    9 years, 9 months ago

    Hello.

    We are migrating a big site (articles and images) from Joomla to WordPress. Because the original site was bilingual every image is duplicated and so, the content is using a bunch of unnecessary space.

    To clean up, I started deleting unused images from the media library. I notice that the used storage space doesn’t change and I see that the images remain in the “uploads” folder in “wp-content”.

    I have two questions:
    – When you delete images from the Media Library should they be (automatically) removed from the uploads folder?
    – If not, what would be the recommended way to manage the images in order to free space from the server? (while keeping everything organized and coherent)

    I looked for this in the wp documentation but I can’t find information about it. It would help me to understand the general “logic” behind the media file handling. By the way, I’m not a developper.

    Your help is very much appreciated. Thank you.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • Hi,

    Yes they should be deleted from the folder when you delete them from the media library. If they’re not being deleted, it usually indicates that the user (www, www-data, apache, whatever) that runs the web server process doesn’t have access to do so.

    Check out this help file for some recommendations on permissions. https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Changing_File_Permissions

    Thread Starter Ana

    (@cielvariable)

    Hi,

    Thank you for your reply. Yes, there was a permissions issue that seems to have been resolved by the Server tech support person. The images I delete now disappear from the wp-content as well.

    However, all images a had deleted before remain in the “uploads” folder and they don’t show in the Media Library. I had already deleted over 300 images and I can’t remember all of them. I’m not sure that manually deleting them from the “uploads” folder would be a good practice either.

    Do you have an idea about how to update the Media library so it actually reflects the content on the disk ? Or on the contrary, how to update the uploads folder to reflect what is in the Media Library?

    Thank you.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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