Delete Extra Images with Media Cleaner to Keep Your Site Healthy

Media Cleaner is a great tool that we recommend for those who add a lot of images and then remove them often. This is great for sites that are constantly adding products to sell, and then when those items are sold, you no longer need the images that are taking up valuable storage space on the hosting server.

It is also good for periodic cleaning of your website even if you don’t add and remove images often. It helps keep your website clean, healthy and running smoothly.

Once installed, it is a simple matter to scan your site, view the images the program says is not being used, and delete those images. After checking your website to make sure that you have not removed any vital images, then go back and empty the trash.

How to Use Media Cleaner

Go to your Media options in the left hand menu. When you hover over it, you will see the option pop up for several things and one of them is “Cleaner”. Click on Cleaner to open the Media Cleaner dashboard (fig. 1).

Before you run a scan, make sure that there is not a notice that the trash needs to be setup first. We try to make sure we do this before turning the program over to the user, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. So if you see that warning please let us know before your run the program.

Click on “Scan” to start the scanning process. (fig. 2)

When the scan is complete you will see a list of images that Media Cleaner has not found attached to any pages or posts on your website. You will want to look through these pictures before you delete them just to double check. Sometimes you may have images in your Media Manager folder that you are not currently using but you are saving for later use. Also, some images are being used but Media Cleaner does not find them attached. These may be images used in a banner and logo images used on your header. That is why we create an attachment page, to attach the images to so Media Cleaner will see that those images are attached to something.

I would suggest you go down to the bottom of the scan list and change the default for the number of rows you can view at one time. My suggestion is to make this 200 or else you may be going through page after page just to view the scanned items. (fig. 3)

If all of the items are clear for deletion, you can click on the top check box which will add a check box to all of the items in the list (on that page). If there are some you don’t want to delete, you can easily go down the list and uncheck those. (fig. 4)

Now click the red “Delete” button to send all of those items to the trash can. (fig. 4)

When the progress bar is complete you will see your items sitting in the trash as noted by the number next to the word “Trash” (fig. 5)

If you click on the words “Trash” above the list, you will be taken to the trash pages where once again you can view all of the images that are sitting in your trash can. To completely remove the items from your trash can and your website server, then click the read “Empty Trash” button in the upper right hand corner. Please keep in mind that once you do this, the images cannot be restored.

If, however, you decided you want to put these images back before emptying the trash, you can click on the “Recover All” button which will put the images back into the scanned (Issues) folder. Or if you want to just put back one image you can select that specific image and put it back into the Issues folder. You can also select Ignore this image so that next time you will not see it appear in your scans but Media Cleaner will continue to ignore it and not add it to the “Issues” folder.

That’s it! Now your website has been cleaned of all of the unwanted images that are bloating your site. After doing it once or twice you will be able to clean your site in about three minutes. So, it really is not a big chore and it is always more pleasurable and faster to work in a clean environment.