Identifying and Removing Redundant Images

I sell, mainly, used books from my site. Whatever the item is I always upload an image of the actual item. I don't, currently, embed images in descriptions although this may be a possibility in the future. I only use stock images for brand new items.

I'd like to be able to run a housekeeping process to identify and remove images for products that are disabled (I keep the description for the next time I have 'one of those' to sell) or products that have been deleted (there is another one already available or it's most unlikely I'll ever have another one).

In the long term I'm talking about uploading, possibly, 300 to 500 images a month and - if the business grows as I hope - possibly into the 1,000's or even 10,000's. Sales will increase such that I'll need to remove, initially, small numbers (can be done manually) but increasing up to 1,000's per month (must be automated otherwise mistakes will happen).

Clearly I'm going to have to do something about this before it gets out of hand. :blink:

Does anyone know if such a tool already exists?

I know this is old but there's no answer and I too am having a problem...

Over the years many, many images have built up on the server that are not used anymore. The site has thousands of products, but has thousands mor images.

How can we remove old, unused images from the server without doing it manually, as it would take months. The sites uses too much disk space.

Thanks

I ended up at this page looking for exactly the same solution. One of my clients adds and removes 20 products per week and has over 1100 products in their Zen Cart system but has over 2000 images on the server.

They don't add images to the description and any other images used throughout the site are in a separate images directory.

If someone could could suggest a MySQL command that can be run on the database to show a list of images currently in use, I'm quite happy to delete all the images not used manually.

If you use ez-populate to pull the products list it will have a column with the image filename for each product listed.

I now have a housekeeping utility that:

• reads the images directory
• identifies and removes orphan images over n days old
• identifies and reports orphan images less than n days old
• reports images used by more than one product
• ignores a list of 'untouchable' files
  It's rough and ready, but works for me on my UNIX server. The date handling will need to be reworked if you're on a Windows server.

No guarantees, but you're welcome to a copy as a starter to meet your own requirements.

UPDATED VERSION OF THE CODE IS POSTED IN THE PLUGINS AREA HERE: http://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1690

The attachment below is the old original code.

I haven't done this, but I have seen a need for it and have given it a small amount of thought. An idea would be to build a PHP script external of Zencart. Make it looks something like...

$sql="SELECT products_image FROM products WHERE products_status = 0";
$sql_result=mysql_query($sql,$connection);
 
while($row=$mysql_fetch_array($sql_result))
{
   unlink("store/images/$row[0]");
}

I haven't actually built this, this is just the rough sketch of an idea I have in my head, but it could be a start to what you need.

jammin320:

I haven't done this, but I have seen a need for it and have given it a small amount of thought. An idea would be to build a PHP script external of Zencart. Make it looks something like...

$sql="SELECT products_image FROM products WHERE products_status = 0";
$sql_result=mysql_query($sql,$connection);

while($row=$mysql_fetch_array($sql_result))
{
unlink("store/images/$row[0]");
}

I admire your enthusiasm, but:

a) It's already written and working, and, 

b) If you follow your own suggestion without thinking it through a *lot *more I do believe you will delete all of your images, if not more.

GSIS:

I admire your enthusiasm, but:

a) It's already written and working, and,

b) If you follow your own suggestion without thinking it through a *lot *more I do believe you will delete all of your images, if not more.

I absolutly agree that it would need work (thus my disclaimer) and your solution would be ideal for many. It is just another thought to add to the post. As written here however, it wouldn't delete all of the images, it runs a greater chance of not deleting any. The premis is solid, I have this basic login included in several tools that link into ZenCart currently and it works well. The advantage of something small like this is that it can be built into a custom page. Yours may as well...I haven't seen it.:mellow:

jammin320:

I absolutly agree that it would need work (thus my disclaimer) and your solution would be ideal for many. It is just another thought to add to the post. As written here however, it wouldn't delete all of the images, it runs a greater chance of not deleting any. The premis is solid, I have this basic login included in several tools that link into ZenCart currently and it works well. The advantage of something small like this is that it can be built into a custom page. Yours may as well...I haven't seen it.:mellow:

I now see the product_status = 0 bit of the sql statement.

Doesn't meet my requirements anyway as I need the image to hang around for a while.

I think mine is best left as a stand-alone utility. I'm looking into running it as a cron job once a week so I don't have to think about it. It would be daft to have a computer and think for yourself. :wink:

GSIS:

It would be daft to have a computer and think for yourself. :wink:

--Well said!:bigups:

Hi GSIS,

I'm running into the same issue -- could I get a copy of that script you created to delete images that have been disabled or deleted? Would really appreciate it...I tried to create one based on the last accessed date in unix but since I backup the entire folder every night the time stamps are off.

thanks,
Don

Does anyone know if this will work on 1.3.8a? I'd love to upgrade this site to the most current version, but the wish list module is a must have for my client and it doesn't work in newer versions.
Thanks
Jim

Yes it will.
But you should really be upgrading since your site has security problems when using that very old version.

ZC 1.5.1

Ran this utility on the images folder - all ok, great script.

My client's site has the product images organized in categories eg images/mens, images/sarongs, images/kaftans etc.

Instead of changing the path to the directory to clean every time, would this work if I set

$imagedirectory = "images/[B]*[/B]";

so it checks and cleans all subdirectories in one cron run?

If not, how could this be implemented?

Thank you so much for this plugin. I should have found this years ago. One question, when running the cron job, and viewing the files, I am noticing that the files displayed are the in the images folder. However I would like to clear out the LRG and MED images as well. Can you tell me what I am missing so that I can view the MED and LRG files since they are the real space hoggers on my server?

Can we run this without a cron job. Just run it when we need to?

I have run this as a job several times and get the same list of images. I note the description says it will "optionally" delete the images. How do I do that, or optionally, move them to a different directory where I can move all off the site?

Hi, just found this script and I'm finding it useful for my site, but I have noticed the script is reporting some of my extra images (the ones named xx_01.jpg, xx_02.jpg) as being orphaned even if the main image and product is still used.

So I've made a tweak to the code (see below) hope someone finds it useful!
Please note, I've tested it on my site and it works but I've only one site to test on!
It searches for underscore then 2 digits, so shouldn't affect image names containing underscores.

Between line 109 and 110, add the preg_replace, this strips the numbers after the _ in the extra image names.

  
  // strip zen extra file upload underscaore and number
      if (preg_replace('/_[0-9]{2}/', '', $subject)) {
       $subjectNew = preg_replace('/_[0-9]{2}/', '', $subject);
         } else {
          $subjectNew = $subject;
         }

Then replace line 114 (change $subject to $subjectNew) so the query searches for the filename without the _ suffix and retains the $subject var for use further on in script.

      
$result = $db->Execute( "SELECT products_id, products_status, products_image FROM " . TABLE_PRODUCTS . " WHERE products_image = '" . zen_db_input($subjectNew ) ."'" );

Follow ups to https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?228148-Image-Purge-Support-Thread please.

Image Purge has been updated to use the additional images processing from the core to identify (and not report as orphans) additional images.