after indexing bulk deleting img not work

I believe I am seeing the same. I choose Hide Duplicates and Preserve Featured. Whether I select boxes or not, I am simply taken to Media Library, and there is no evidence that anything is being cleaned up.

Does this utility do an overall cleanup without selecting individual boxes? I would have almost 4000 pages of your checkboxes to go through.

I have over 39,000 duplicate images and am very concerned about running out of hard drive space. I hope you respond to us soon!

Jim

Sorry for the delayed response. We’re investigating now and hope to have an answer for you later today.

Thank you! I look forward to hearing from you. Do let me know if your plugin will only work for me page by page. Again, with that many images and database records, I might have to come up with another solution.

Jim

So: we weren’t able to replicated this exact behavior, but discovered something nearly identical. We’ve pushed out a release, 1.2.2, that we expect will fix the issue, but please post if that’s not the case and we’ll spend more time trying to replicate the exact bug you’re encountering.

Thanks for trying Media Deduper and reporting your issues!

Side note: As with other WordPress admin pages, you can go into the Screen Options tab in the upper right and change the number of media items shown on each screen. You’ll still need to manually go through page by page, but you can at least have it shown something like 500 items per page instead of just 10 or 20. Hope that helps!

That does help. I will try 1.2.2 tonight. Thanks again for your quick responses today.

Jim

Hello. We’re almost there. I hope this helps with testing. Here’s the play by play.

– I have 1.2.2 installed and it no longer goes to Media Library. WP showed the update was available by the time I got home.
– I choose Hide Dups That Share, and Delete Preserving Featured.
– I selected the boxes I wanted and deleted all those related to a set of duplicate test images. (Thanks a million for the tip on the number of images I can view. I never noticed that feature!)
– I was told that 167 ‘items’ were deleted and none were skipped. Nice!
– I looked in my post table and saw only a single reference to my test image (Captain Picard). The sequence of ids reflected a gap where the deleted images were referenced. Perfect.
– I looked into my image folder and my images are all there. Here’s an actual example of the 625th file name. Captain-Picard-Christmas-sd-625-462×344.jpg. My images are stored in subfolders by month. I don’t know how common/uncommon that sort of scenario is, but I didn’t create them myself.

If I weren’t dealing with 39,000 images, deleting them myself through FTP would not be a problem. It would be most ideal if this could all be done in one shot. If having more precise information regarding file/folder structure would be helpful to you for perfecting this, please email me directly jim @ caflicks . org.

An excellent experience so far. I look forward to hearing from you.

Jim

Thanks for the report back. Organizing into year/month folders is a common WordPress approach, if you go into Settings > Media you’ll see the checkbox for it. Nothing unusual there.

The way Media Deduper tells WordPress to delete the media posts should cause the actual files to be deleted, not just the posts in the database; I’m definitely concerned if you’re seeing the actual files still present, as half the point of Deduper is cleaning up disk usage. We’ll run some tests here to see if we can replicate what you’re seeing and I’ll let you know what we find in the next day or two… but it really SHOULD be deleting them.

Note: Media Deduper does not tell WordPress to do a “force delete.” In a typical WordPress install, Media items do not go into an emptied-monthly Trash but are automatically deleted. However, it’s possible to use a plugin or a very small bit of code to activate the Trash for media posts. If you’ve done so, then Media Deduper will just move Media posts to the Trash and not fully delete them, which would result in their actual associated media files not getting removed from the filesystem until the trash was emptied.

In our testing, file deletions were occurring immediately as expected when the media trash was not enabled; the only thing I can think of offhand is that you’ve got some weird permissions issues preventing WordPress from being able to delete the files… but I’ll keep pondering and testing.

Where might I find evidence of such a temporary trash bin being enabled? Would it be a setting in the options table? Might there be an icon? A screen capture would be handy, if applicable. If it is something I can disable, I will do so and attempt another test deletion tonight.

Jim

Easiest way is probably to navigate to your media library and see if media items there give you the option to “Delete Permanently” or the option to “Trash”. Delete Permanently is the WordPress default —?“Trash” being shown means somewhere (could be a plugin, could be in your config file) the MEDIA_TRASH php constant was set to true.

Delete Permanently is my only option. A search run through all of my folders did not return the phrase ‘media_trash’. Would that be in a table?

During a second attempt, I did find media_trash in a couple of .js files. Both were just inside my includes folder. One only made reference to it in a remark statement, indicating “If MEDIA_TRASH is true…”, but there was no other reference to it. The second mentioned it a number of times, but I couldn’t seem to find anything that set it to true or false. The other file mentioned what to do if .mediaTrash was set to something, but I could not identify a means to turn it on or off with a true or false. Please make note that I’ve never programmed in Javascript before.

I could find no reference to Media_Trash in a PHP file.

If you would, please set this back to Not Resolved for the time being. I’m still running out of hard drive space, so I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks!

Jim

Just following up on this. Is there any specific information you need from me in order to delete the files identified in the database cleanup? These are images associated with a video gallery. I don’t know if that helps at all. Again, everything is in going to that uploads folder as mentioned above.

Jim

Hi Jim,

It’s clear from all the information you’ve provided that you don’t have MEDIA_TRASH enabled. That’s good in the sense that it means your environment is how we assume users will typically have things configured, and it means that your files SHOULD be getting deleted when you used Media Deduper to delete media posts.

But it’s bad in the sense that it means things aren’t behaving as expected. Media Deduper should be deleting files on your system when you’re running it, and it sounds like it’s not. In our testing, we’ve been unable to replicate this problem.

Since Deduper uses built-in WordPress functions to handle the deletion, I’d be curious to know if you have tried manually deleting any media posts from the normal Media screens (rather than from Deduper). If you’ve done that, have you seen the associated media files get deleted from your filesystem?

I deleted one and FTPd into the folder but still see the images in there, along with their variants. (video-sd-40883-1, -2, -3, etc.)

Is there a way you might be able to look at things directly? I’m at a loss and concerned about losing my site due to these duplicates. jim @ caflicks . net

Jim