Have you reviewed the gallery since you set up your WordPress site? You may be surprised to learn that besides important files, your media library also contains a lot of unused and irrelevant images.
Below I will explain why you should clean up WordPress images. Learn two ways to rearrange your images.
Contents
Why should you clean up WordPress images?
There are two common reasons for you to clean up your library:
Save storage space on Server
Whenever you upload an image to the gallery, WordPress automatically creates different versions of it. Common image sizes are small, medium, and large. Plugins and themes also need different image sizes. As a result, each of your photos has at least 5 distinct copies.
These never-used files will take up a lot of space on your hosting server. As a result, it will take longer to back up your website than usual. On top of that, increasing storage can cost you more each month even though you’re not using as much disk space.
Better image arrangement
The number of media files in your media library keeps growing over time. If you don’t clean it up, it will be filled with unnecessary images. From there, you will find it difficult and time-consuming to find and reuse old files.
You can’t just scroll down an endless list of images to click on each one. Removing unused images makes the WordPress gallery more compact.
2 Simple Ways to Cleanup WordPress Images
#1 Stop making duplicate images with different sizes
As I mentioned above, WordPress automatically copies an uploaded file with different sizes. To stop this, all you need to do is visit the Media page in Settings in your WordPress admin dashboard.
You can see 3 available image sizes, including Thumbnail Size, Medium Size, and Large Size. Now you set all values in these image size options to 0 so that WordPress stops automatically copying your uploaded images.
#2 Clean up WordPress images with Media Cleaner Plugin
Media Cleaner helps move all files that are not embedded anywhere on the web to the internal trash. You can later decide to delete or ignore those files. Follow the instructions below to get started with the plugin:
– Go to Plugins → Add New in your admin dashboard
– Enter “media clean” in the keyword box to search for the plugin
– Install and activate the plugin
– Open a new Cleaner section in your Media menu
– Hit the Scan button so the plugin can start going through your gallery, pages and posts to check which files are not currently in use
– Check the box of files you want to delete permanently
– Tap Delete all or Delete… items to delete these files
Remember that you must back up your site before taking any action or it may corrupt your library. After deleting files, you cannot undo and restore them in any way
Epilogue
Hopefully with these 2 small tips will help you organize your website’s images more effectively.
If you find it interesting, you can follow the basic WordPress section to know more new knowledge.
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