How to Clean up WordPress Duplicate & Repeated Images

WordPress duplicate and unused images consume tons of storage space on your server. And without a proper storage management practice, your server will sometimes run out of space. So, the best WordPress website care practice is always to clean up the media library by deleting these repeated images and other unused files that take up extra space. So, get ready to equip yourself with the proper management skills to avoid piling up your media library in this guide. Hence, you will learn how to remove duplicate images, delete unused plugins, and optimize your WordPress Media library for better performance.

We recently shared a guide about how to delete inactive themes in WordPress, another tactic that will save server storage. If you like, you may check it out. But in this guide will focus on optimizing your WordPress Media Library. So, we will list a number of WordPress cleaner Plugins you can use to get the job done.

Why Should I remove WordPress duplicate images?

1. Duplicate images take up extra storage space in WordPress.

From time to time, you will upload tons of images to use on your WordPress website. But you may not use some of these images, yet they still consume your server storage. So, a regular clean-up of your WordPress media library will help delete all unattached, repeated, and duplicate images. As a result, you will free up space and avoid purchasing more server storage.

2. Duplicate images slow down your WordPress website.

Duplicate and unused images in your WordPress media library slow down your website. So, to keep your WordPress website running healthily and faster, we recommend you always clean up WordPress duplicates.  There are several plugins in WordPress that can assist you with this as we will see below.

Also, take more care the next time you upload an image. Always upload low-space consuming images but of high quality. That way, there will be no need to upload more images to replace old ones.

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How to find and delete unattached images in the Media Library

The first thing to do while cleaning up your WordPress media library is to delete unattached images. In other words, images you have never added to a page, post, or any other website publication. So, here is how you can find all unattached images in WordPress without installing an extra plugin.

1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to the left panel.

2. Look for Media, and click on Library to go to the media library page. Here, you will find all images you have ever uploaded in WordPress. But we are most interested in the unattached or unused WordPress images.

3. So, click on the first media filter on your left, and from the list, select Unattached. This action will sort out and return only the unattached images.

4. Finally, click on any image, and scroll down on the right panel to find the Delete permanently option at the bottom.

The above action will thoroughly remove the selected image from your WordPress media library. Unfortunately, there is no bulk selection for this action. So, you will have to perform step 4 for each unattached image on the list.

How to remove WordPress duplicate and repeated images

Unlike unused images, manually finding duplicate and repeated images in WordPress is irksome. So we recommend using WordPress plugins like Media Deduper or Media Cleaner to trace and delete duplicate images.

1. Use Media Deduper

Media Deduper is one of the best WordPress Media Library plugins you can use to clean up duplicate images and free up space on your server. Before starting, download and install the Media Deduper plugin into your WordPress website. Once you have set up the plugin, a new option called “Manage Duplicates” will appear in your Media section. So, follow the steps below to delete all your WordPress duplicate images.

1. Go to Media and click Manage Duplicates. This action will take you to Media Deduper page.

2. The next step requires you to allow Media Deduper to analyze your media library for WordPress duplicate images. So, click Index Media to start the analysis process.

Media Deduper will take a few seconds to analyze your WordPress duplicate or repeated images. When you see “Indexing complete”, scroll down and click “Manage Duplicates Now” button.

Top 5 Media library cleaners and management plugins for WordPress

When discussing how to manage WordPress media library, it goes beyond just removing duplicate images. You would want to track all unused media and delete them. Clean up your WordPress database. Optimize images in your media library, and resize them to save space on your WordPress server.

So, here are the top 5 media library cleaners and management plugins we found essential for WordPress users:

1. WPS Cleaner

Do you want a more flexible way of managing your WordPress media library and Database? WPS Cleaner will do the trick. It can clean up unused media, plugins, and themes from your WordPress server. Displays database tables and a total number of media, such as images and videos. And also can perform backups for unused media before you remove them from Database.

2. FileBird

If you want an improved way of organizing and managing your WordPress media library, FileBird is should be your management and cleaning WordPress plugin. It is user-friendly, allowing you to arrange your WordPress files into folders for easy navigation whenever you need them. With FileBird, you can create unlimited folders and subfolders, drag and drop files between folders, and rearrange them as needed.

3. Enable Media Replace

Do you find challenges while replacing media in your WordPress website? Hustle no more! “Enable Media Replace” allows you to replace media files (such as images, videos, or documents) within your WordPress media library while maintaining the same file URL. 

It’s a handy tool for updating or replacing an existing media file without changing the links or references to that file on your website. Actually, you just have to replace the image in the media library once and the changes will happen across the entire site where the replaced image was used.

4. Imsanity

Imsanity will help to optimize and resize images uploaded to your WordPress media library. It automatically resizes large image files to a more manageable size, helping to reduce storage space usage and improve website performance.

If you want a better way to manage your media library size in WordPress, Imsanity will ease this for you. It comes with customizable settings and bulk resizing options. Additionally, it is easy to integrate with your WordPress website.

5. WP Offload Media

“WP Offload Media” is another incredible WordPress media cleaning and management plugin anyone will need. It goes beyond just removing duplicate images from from your WordPress Media Library. It also provides a solution for offloading your media library to a cloud storage service, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or DigitalOcean Spaces. By offloading your media files, you can reduce the storage space used on your WordPress server and improve website performance.

WP Offload Media offers additional features and add-ons, such as image optimization, support for multisite installations, and compatibility with popular plugins like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.

Conclusion

Cleaning up your media library for all WordPress duplicate and repeated images will make your website faster and healthier. So, we recommend you keep track of all repeated images in WordPress from time to time.

We hope this article has helped you maintain your WordPress website. We are WordPress enthusiastic, so we create WordPress website care guides from time to time to help our team. In addition, we use the same guides to support our clients using our WordPress Website Care Plans. If you wish, you can check our WordPress Website care guides for more.

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