Great Tool – Intuitive, Efficient, Safe

Media Cleaner is an excellent tool to clean up unused and orphaned media. I have been thinking about doing this for several months but always deferred. I couldn’t find a plugin that would safely remove unused and orphaned media while providing a recovery capability in case I removed something that was actually being used by the website.

I installed the free version on a test website and tried it – it looked good and offered the safety features I was looking for. I then bought a 1 year subscription so I could scan for and delete orphaned media. I installed the Pro version on my live website and went to work.

The documentation has two critically important prerequisites.
1. Back up your website. Any time you’re doing something that is global and fundamental to your website you should have a backup as the ultimate “disaster recovery” safe guard.
2. Be sure to modify your website’s wp-config.php file to include the code line
define( ‘MEDIA_TRASH’, true );
With this in place “deletes” are temporary (they are moved to a Trash folder and can be undone easily).
Without it “deletes” are permanent (no Trash folder).

Media Cleaner provides a great UI along with a straight forward, intuitive approach that provides absolute safety as long as you follow the instructions in the tutorial.
1. In Settings you set the criteria for the type of media you’re looking for (unused, orphaned, or thumbnails).
2. Perform a Scan and then Refresh the page. A list of all the media that matches your Settings criteria is displayed.
3. You can “delete” individual items or in bulk (it is a temporary deletion into a Trash folder – provided you included the code line in wp-config.php).
4. Review your website. If it is missing any media you can display the Trash folder and easily recover any/all items – they are “un-deleted” and back on your website. If your website is fine you can leave items in Trash as long as you want to allow any issues to be discovered through normal use.
5. Once you are certain everything is o.k. you can empty the Trash folder making the temporary deletions permanent – the files are no longer taking up space on your WP website.

My website is pretty small – a non-profit club with read-only pages with lots of pictures and a few documents. Pictures are regularly updated with new ones so over 8 years we’ve created a lot of junk. Media Cleaner found 129 unused items and 169 orphaned items. I was careful deleting (temporary deletion) the 129 unused because the website has a couple of media plugins (a slide show gallery and a photo gallery). Media Cleaner correctly identified the pictures in the photo gallery as being used but thought all the slide show gallery pictures were not used. I deleted 20 items at a time and then reviewed my website, if anything was missing I “undid” the last deletion to recover the pictures and then carefully deleted them to avoid deleting the ones that were in use (in the slide show gallery). The slide show pictures I marked as “Ignore” so that Media Cleaner would skip over them on any subsequent scan.

Very intuitive, very easy, very safe.

The whole process took me about 2 hours and, the best part, I knew I wasn’t going to accidentally trash my website.

I haven’t done the thumbnails yet but it is the same safe process so I’m not intimidated by it.