Per Nergård (MVP)
OMVPSaaS CMS Developer CertificationCommerce Connect 13 Developer Certification +2
Sep 5, 2017
visibility 6404
star star star star star star
(6 votes)

Plugin for deleting unreferenced media

Sometimes you need to synch a dev-environment with production database and media and the blob-storage is huge with likely a lot of unreferenced media or perphaps want to clean up a test-environment.

To help in those two scenarios I threw togheter a small plugin that lets you delete all or just selected unreferenced media. Really nothing to say about the code than it can be found over at my Gist.

It looks like this:

Image cleaner.jpg

Sep 05, 2017

Comments

valdis
valdis Sep 6, 2017 08:44 AM

where you were couple weeks ago? when we had ~ 1TB of unreferenced media ?? :) great plugin

Per Nergård (MVP)
Per Nergård (MVP) Sep 6, 2017 09:13 AM

Valdis: Thanks. Actually did this before the vacations but haven't got around blogging for quite a while. Been thinking about doing a scheduled job version for a more hardcore approach to keeping the assets folder clean :)

Per Nergård (MVP)
Per Nergård (MVP) Sep 6, 2017 03:06 PM

Gosso: I googled before I made the plugin but not good enough. But my version has cherry picking of files. :)

Luc Gosso (MVP)
Luc Gosso (MVP) Sep 6, 2017 03:56 PM

Also check out the mega super awesome amazing DownloadIfMissingFileBlogProvider for dev and staging environment.

with that addon you can

  • ... delete all blobs - and it takes care of downloading the images/documents you need
  • ... use diskspace to other things... It only downloads the blobs you're using
  • ... go home earlier, since you'll never ever need to download the blob-directory anymore.

Try it =)

Per Nergård (MVP)
Per Nergård (MVP) Sep 6, 2017 04:16 PM

I agree that your DownloadIfMissingFileBlogProvider is the best thing since slice bread. :)

valdis
valdis Sep 7, 2017 05:59 PM

I guys will leave you there :D

Johan Book
Johan Book Feb 17, 2018 10:31 AM

I just wrote a quick script to remove blobs that have no entry in CMS, then I found this post :D

To Per's defence, his version does indeed go one extra step by checking what's actually referenced, and not only what exists in CMS. The DownloadIfMissing plugin looks awesome, but if you can't use it for some reason you'll need to do a combination of both approaches to slim it to the maxx. Thanks Per!

Per Nergård (MVP)
Per Nergård (MVP) Feb 26, 2018 11:44 PM

Glad you found it usefull.

error Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Surviving a Dirty Feed. Part 3: Error Handling and Event Batching

Committing a 250,000-row Optimizely catalog import row by row, returning a per-row failure report, and coalescing catalog events into one per batch.

Stanisław Szołkowski | Oct 16, 2026 |

Building UI Extensions for Optimizely SaaS CMS

Introduction Developers have been extending the functionality of Optimizely PaaS CMS for years using addons built in C# and deployed as NuGet...

Mark Stott | Oct 15, 2026

Cheapskate AI Translator: Because Translation Should Not Require a Second Mortgage

There is a particular kind of software project that begins with a detailed architecture document, a product roadmap, and a carefully assembled...

Linh Doan Cuu | Oct 15, 2026

Computed Fields in CMS 13 Content Contracts with Optimizely Graph

Content Contracts in Optimizely CMS 13 allow different content types to share a common structure when querying Optimizely Graph. But what if the...

Mardy | Oct 14, 2026