stop WP creating empty media folders

they may add clutter but since they’re empty they don’t take up space or bandwidth what’s the problem? your content isn’t affected by them and serving the content to the website for visitors isn’t impacted by them. just leave them as they are, they’re not doing your site any harm…

On a typical Linux server, every folder is allocated 4kB (i.e. the size of the directory block containing the pointer to the folder) and, so it’s not true empty folders take no space. So the year folder takes 4 kB and 12 monthly folders take 4kB which is 52 kB of wasted space per year, assuming no media uploaded. Not a big deal, but why do that, why create empty, unused folders?

When FTPing to the site, I’d like to be able to find folders which have content rather than having to guess, or look at each one.

It’s easy to have the PHP script check for existence of a folder prior to uploading media and to create it at that time — i.e. it would be simple to have WP only create folders that were used. I would like to understand the logic behind creating folders — placeholders — in the event something “might” be uploaded.

it creates them as the months tick by, so that in any given month if you upload stuff then there’s somewhere for it to go. if you want to delete the empty folders after that month has passed then go ahead but at the turn of the calendar page it will create a folder for that month because that’s the logical thing to do…

In what alternate universe is it logical to create an empty “placeholder” folder just because a new month has occurred? It is logical to create a folder when, and only when, there is something to place into it. (While on the subject, how is anything WordPress does respecting media logical?)

it’s logical because the expectation is that each month as you create new content you’ll be uploading new stuff so it creates that folder in expectation of new content coming in.

it’s novemeber now, there’s currently no december folder in my hosting but there will be on the 1st of december when it’s logical to assume i’ll be adding in new content for the month.

that’s what i mean by logical.

Bump — can someone please reply to the question, not tell me why I should be happy with this silly feature of WordPress

Agreed. The question is, can the folder be created when needed when the first item is loaded into it, and not be strictly time based. The logic should be simple, and a filter to control this behavior would be helpful.

A large number of unused folders gives the impression there is a lot of content and can pose an additional security risk as it is tiresome to go through each one just to see if something is there.