drywallbmb

Great! Glad the new release resolved the issue, sorry it took a while.

Thanks. WordPress makes this exceptionally difficult to implement, as it doesn’t allow HTML to be included in warning messages, but we’re working on a solution.

Thanks for reporting this bug, we’ll take a look as soon as we can!

Hi there!

Thanks for some great questions, I’ll answer them the best I can.

• It does not create a table —?as you identified, what it does is add two meta fields to wp_posts, mdd_hash and mdd_size. If Media Deduper is uninstalled, it should delete all those meta values. If you’re familiar with SQL it’s also pretty straightforward to remove them yourself if you need to.
• Yes, Deduper utilizes WordPress’s native wp_delete_attachment function to delete items, which should delete all sizes.
• No, Deduper is not just using the filesize to determine if two files are identical. It’s actually using an md5 hash of the file data itself, to avoid false matches like you describe.
• You’re correct that it won’t find those —?it only looks at files that are linked to attachment posts in the database, so something uploaded via FTP but not in the Media Library would be ignored.
• Yes, Deduper uses AJAX to manage the indexing, with one AJAX request sent per item in the Media Library. Each AJAX call triggers calculating the filesize and md5 hash of the file, so it’s a bit resource-intensive but not terrible. Haven’t had reports of problems yet. Obviously we want to build and offer a good product that works for everyone, but tracking down specific problems with specific discount shared hosts can be quite tricky.
• It’s on our roadmap to add a button or other feature to trigger a new scan, but right now there’s no convenient way to do it from the admin. If you properly uninstall the plugin, that should wipe out the metadata, or again if you’re savvy with SQL you could run a query to do it without having to uninstall.

Hope that helps! Thanks for trying out Media Deduper.

If I’m understanding you correctly, it sounds like even a normal deletion of a media file from WordPress (not having anything to do with Deduper) is not working as expected, as files were not deleted when a media post was deleted. This would suggest the problem is with your WordPress install or your host, and not with Deduper itself. Does that sound right to you?

If so, you may want to see if maybe your web host can help you identify the problem — I would guess that maybe it’s an issue relating to file permissions.

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?

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.

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.

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.

No problem, sorry I wasn’t clearer earlier.

Hope it goes well!

Sorry, sounds like I didn’t explain it well. Maybe an example would be best.

Let’s say you added an asset to your Media Library called file1.jpg, and that your WordPress theme then generated a bunch of different resized versions to appear in different places on your site, like file1-200×200.jpg and file1-200×50.jpg and file1-400×400.jpg.

Then nine months later you added the exact same file but it was named myawesomefile.jpg. Your theme would also create myawesomefile-200×200.jpg, myawesomefile-200×50.jpg and myawesomefile-400×400.jpg.

Then you install and run Media Deduper. Deduper would see that myawesomefile.jpg and file1.jpg were the same file, and flag them as duplicates.

So you go ahead and tell Media Deduper to delete the media item for myawesomefile.jpg. What will happen is that Deduper will tell WordPress to delete the “attachment” post, which means that the post in your media library will be deleted from the database, and that myawesomefile.jpg, myawesomefile-200×200.jpg, myawesomefile-200×50.jpg and myawesomefile-400×400.jpg would all be deleted from your filesystem. After that, file1.jpg and all its variants would remain in your filesystem and media library, but Deduper would no longer consider it a duplicate.

Does that make sense?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by drywallbmb.

Thanks for these feature requests! We’ll take them under consideration, particularly the first one — that’s not a good user experience.

Thanks for using Media Deduper!

Media Deduper would know that filename-100×100.jpg is different than filename-200×200.jpg, but in determining duplicate media it actually just compares the originally uploaded file, not any resized/cropped variants.

When deleting a duplicate, it should delete the original as well as any and all resized versions, though.

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!

Hi BJuniper,

Thanks for downloading Media Deduper.

The “Attached”/”Detached” indicator is something built-in to WordPress and is not something Deduper takes into consideration at all. What WordPress considers “attached” is not always what a human being would consider attached (see https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/media-library-attach-detachwhat-is-the-point/ for some discussion, for example) and so Deduper doesn’t try to use it to figure anything out.

I do think the recommended first-time-through approach would be, as you said, Hide Duplicates that Share Files > Delete Preserving Featured. However, that can still lead to undesired data loss, as deduper only knows about “Featured” images and other other ways of using images in posts, such as in the post body or in a [gallery] or other shortcode.

For that reason I’d recommend you make a full backup of your site, including the uploads folder and database, before deleting anything. Sounds like you’ve already got that, though, so I think you’re okay to proceed.

Media Deduper will not only delete the media files, it’ll also delete the attachment posts from the database.