How to Identify Unused Images in Wagtail CMS

Hey y'all, Megan here. I'm doing some image cleanup on Wagtail. org this week and I thought y'all would like to see how I go about it. Alright, so right here we have The uh wagtail. org image library. I went ahead and sorted it to the oldest images in the library just because those are the ones that are most likely not to be used anymore. We did a lot of like archiving of pages and moving content around and things like that. So chances are there are some images that are not really being used anymore or being underused. So let's go ahead and click on an image here and then I'm gonna select all and then I'm gonna do something a little unintuitive here. I'm gonna hit the delete button Yeah, delete.

But don't worry, watch what happens. When you hit delete like this, you get a are you really sure message before it Wagtail just obliterates your images Uh so and that's one of the things that I love about Wagtail is that it really is kind of like, are you sure? Are you really sure? Um before you get a chance to delete things. And so it's it's a very useful feature. And what you get is this whole list of images on that page, and you not only get their names and things like that, but also you can see at a glance like uh how many times they've been used. And just, you know, scanning down here, I can see that, you know, all these images have been used one or two times.

So in this case, I definitely don't want to delete these images without taking a closer look at what they're being used for. So I'm gonna go ahead and say let's let's not delete these. And I actually went through a couple pages of our older images before I it occurred to me that I should show you guys uh how I'm going about this. So I'm gonna go ahead and click through to our third oldest page of images. Uh and I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm gonna go ahead and select all the images here and then I'm gonna hit that delete button uh no matter you know how wrong it feels Uh, you know, I take comfort in knowing that this message will stop me uh

and keep me from going too far. And so as you can see Uh once again we have you know a bunch of images that are used one time, but we also have a bunch that are used zero times here. And what I'm gonna do Because I have this nice handy dandy list here is I'm just gonna go ahead and right click and open the image up in a new tab. And I'm just gonna go ahead and do that for a few images. If y'all weren't watching me, I would just go ahead and do that for the whole page, just so that I have everything open in fresh tabs and can keep track of things. And so when I click over to this tab here, we can see we have this older image. It was probably from like a way older version of Wagtail.

Uh back before, like you can see here we have like you know the old uh sidebar and things like that. Uh this is definitely a very, very old image and we definitely don't use it anymore. So, you know, I can confirm that it's not being used. Also, if I really wanted to save a copy, what I can do here is I can open up the original image in a new tab as well. I can just go ahead and right click, save image as, and I kind of have a backup folder here of images that I'm like well maybe I might want to use them later and don't want to completely delete them, but they shouldn't really live on the web server anymore. So you can definitely do that if you want to as well. It really depends on what sort of backups you want.

But once you've made your decision that, you know, this image really has no use anymore, you can be like Marie Kondo if you want. You can thank the image for what it did for you back in the day when it was useful. But now it's time to let it go. And so in making that decision, I'm going to go to the actions menu right here. And then I'm gonna hit delete. And once again, I'm prompted. Do you really want to do this? Uh and yes, I'm gonna go ahead and do this. Alright, so uh pretty much what I'm planning to do is to go through all our images that are being used zero times and do exactly that. I will probably also do a pass and look a little closer at the images that are being used once, just because Wagtail will say

even if a page uh has been moved to private or if it's still in draft state uh that the image is being used. So it's worth taking a closer look at those as well. All right, if you enjoyed that tip, uh please consider signing up for our newsletter this week in Wagtail. You can find that at wagtail. org slash newsletter Also, we have a webinar coming up in May. If you'd like to meet me and other members of the core team in person, please consider coming along. I'm going to include the link down in the video description. We got two times Uh for two different time zones, whichever time works the best for you, please come along. I really hope you can make it