Duplicated Images in Media Library

If you didn’t install any new plugins, did you make any changes at all yesterday before the issues you are having? Aside from you not making any changes, the only thing I could think of happening would be something that your hosting provider changed on their side. As to why that would start duplicating images on your site I can’t say for sure.

The images are exact duplicates? Not just different sizes/resolutions as there are plugins that can generate multiple different sized images for you to use across a theme.

Thanks.

No, there exact dupes, same file size but just with a slightly longer file name ‘-1’ appended, ie
Launceston-1-1-1-1-1-1-1.jpg… sometimes ‘-2’

Any further thoughts? Thanks

Steve

Hmm that is quite odd, never had that happen personally and haven’t had much luck with searching finding others with a similar issue. Not sure if anybody else will chime in, but I would contact your hosting provider’s support team to have them investigate further.

Something had to change somewhere in the setup that is causing the images to generate. If you go into the Media Library and view an image so that the Attachment Details window pops up, then click on Edit more details on the right hand side does it list the duplicates all being created at the same time as well or does that change?

My current guess that may be creating the images would be a cron job since that runs every X minutes/hours/days.

Hi Jarret

It’s bizarre, the majority of them have the same dates ramp although I did notice *some” are in a folder called ‘____trashed’

Hi again Jarret

Looks like I *may* have partially solved it. The workaround might be a coincidence, but for interest, here is what I found…

I realised that my main laptop was still on *UK time* (where I was doing most of my postings). This seems un-related, I know, but when I set the time to the same as my phone – the local time here in Oz – and then went back to the laptop and uploaded a single photo, I only get a *few* dupes (not the 100s I had been seeing) but still with a weird filename structure though like:-
DSC12345-1-1-1-1-1-1-.jpg and then DSC12345-1-1-1-1-1-1-1.jpg (note the extra ‘-1’) – some are even longer with even more ‘-1’ added to the filename.

I’ve noticed that these are ‘unused’ by using the filter option in the Media Library, so I guess I could delete them? Still not sure WHY I’m getting the dupes

Maybe it’s all a coincidence, but it all seems workable at the moment.

All the best

Steve

Spoke too soon! After uploading a si gle photo today there’s now over 60 variants of the same file (just with ‘-1-1-1-1…-1 appended to the filename.

Darn!

Steve

In my situation, they just stopped duplicating -I didn’t do anything at my end so it looks like it kinda fixed itself. Very weird. Each day now I check when I add an image, and so far no dupes!