With Remove Detached Images plugin you will be able to delete all unnecessary images in your WordPress installation. It also works with all AppThemes themes.

Why I should use this plugin?

I have created this plugin because my ClassiPress site has become huge. When checking my ISP dashboard I’ve noticed that number of files has nearly reached the maximum. You all know what happens then even if that really never happened to you. You will probable agree, it’s not a good thing.

Then I went to my WordPress dashboard and checked how many detached files or images there are. And WordPress showed around 3000 images that were not linked to any post. But that could not be true I said, since I knew there should be at least 50.000 files. Then I remembered, every image has also thumbnails. But there is no information about that. So I still didn’t know how many files are there that can be deleted.

I could just delete the files from WordPress dashboard, but that will also delete files that you have uploaded and are still used on your site, but not linked to any post. Doing that was out of the question.

That’s why I decided to create a plugin that will show me all that and delete the files for me. Safely.

How this plugin works

After you install this plugin, go to plugin settings and there you will see on the top some statistics about your files.

Plugin’s settings

Before you delete or scan anything, you should go to Settings tab and exclude yourself as an author from image removal process. So click on “Do not remove my images“. If there are other administrators putting files online, consider excluding them also.

After saving settings you can proceed to Images tab and press Scan button. This might take a minute or so. It depends on the number of files and server performance.

After the scanning for files is complete you will see a list of images that you can remove.

Scanned files

The process goes like this

If there are images you don’t want to remove, you can Ignore them by selecting them and pressing Ignore button.

First you select or filter images you wish to remove and then press Trash Selected or Trash FILTERED. Or even Trash ALL.
After you press the button, the images will be moved from their original folder to plugin backup folder which is located in Uploads folder. At this point the image still exists in WordPress database and can be easily restored. Thumbnails are not backed up, only removed.

Trashed images

When you restore an image it will be moved back it’s original location and thumbnails will be recreated.

Next step here is deciding that these images are really not needed on your site. After you decide that, you can go ahead and purge files. This step will remove the images from backup folder and will also remove record from WordPress database. There is no way back after that!

Version history

2016/08/12 – 1.0.0 – Initial version
2016/08/16 – 1.0.1 – Fixed tabs position
2017/03/21 – 1.1.0 – Compatibility with EasyCPMods Toolbox plugin
2020/01/07 – 1.1.1 – Fixed some small bugs