In the early days my site went through a lot of organic growth – partly because I was new to WordPress, partly because my site is a community news and information hub which my visitors can influence. This included trying out a lot of plug-ins that I ended up not keeping for one reason or another. Consequently, when I first installed Media Library Folders the media folders were very untidy. That, after all, is why I installed MLF.
Ok – I know. Don’t test on a live system. I was changing from Microsoft to Linux on my development hardware so had a learning curve there too (switching from WAMP to a LAMP stack, re-learning UNIX/LINUX etc). It all takes time. Also, as it was new it wasn’t really a ‘live’ system before it was made public. It’s taken time to get it to the ‘this is too dangerous to dabble with’ stage.
After I installed MLF I went through a gradual clean-up and re-ordering process. During this I found it well worth keeping a control panel window open so I could check that moves and all file/folder deletions were actually happening – and, if not find out why not. I tried to let MLF do all the work, only intervening if MLF didn’t do what I anticipated. Problems I gradually became aware of included files with names that had not been sanitised and stray thumbnails left over from pre-MLF days. It’s seriously irritating when MLF shows an empty folder, then gives you a couple of screenfulls of thumbnails when you do a final sync (to be sure) before deleting the folder!
My general observation – not ‘scientific’ or forensic debugging by any means – leads me to believe that most of the occurrences I saw of MLF not doing what I anticipated was due to orphan thumbnails and the unsanitised filenames that had crept into my media folders before I installed MLF.
I would anticipate that if you know WordPress you will probably install MLF or some other media manager plug-in before you start adding any media. You will start with clean media folders. If, like me, you’re at the start of the WordPress learning curve you’ll start with its core media management and, if you have a very graphic site, find that the core media management is not really very scalable. After some time the media folders will end up full of junk that isn’t easy to get rid of. You’ll then install MLF (or something similar) and hope that’ll fix it. In practice, though, it’ll take time and effort to make sense of that untidy uploads folder. For now, the free version of MLF works for me. It’s nice to know there is a way forward if/when I need more out of it.
Don’t despair. Data cleansing may seem like a daunting task that you’ll never complete (like eating an elephant). You can do it in small chunks – one bite at a time. That’s how to eat an elephant.
