Feature Request: Sort Duplicates by File Size & Screen Options

Hi there,

Thanks for using Media Deduper, and thanks for your feedback!

We’ve got a number of potential features and enhancements on our radar, and we’ll be sure to add these as well — all perfectly good and reasonable requests that I can see the use of.

Out of curiosity, would it have been useful to you if the index had been generated in the background (via cron) instead of having to manually initiate it and leave that page open? It probably would add a not-insignificant amount of time to how long it takes to generate the index, but would eliminate the need to babysit the process.

Thanks @drywallbmb — Much appreciate your reply. ?? As a fellow plugin author, I know support is always the hardest part of the whole process!

Leaving the tab open to process 6TB of files was not a problem — for me — since it did not block use of the WordPress site while it was running. Cron could be a useful option, although I doubt quite necessary. I doubt you will find many people using this plugin on SUCH a large data set. Babysitting it was easy. ??

The biggest issue for me — is the sort by filesize largest first. Otherwise, there’s so many pages to run through it makes it impossible to look through 7000+ pages of duplicates. ??

Cheers

Thanks.

Just so you know: Sorting by filesize is apparently nontrivial (I’ve been looking into it). Despite showing filesize in the Media UI, WordPress isn’t actually in the habit of storing the filesize information in the database anywhere. Without it in the DB, one can’t query posts and sort by filesize.

It would, of course, be possible for this plugin to add some postmeta regarding filesize for each attachment, much like it stores a hash of the file data, and then use that to sort by size. But I think that’s adding more to the DB than I’d really care to do. Maybe for a “Pro” version of this plugin?

Sure it is. The file size of all media is attached to the media item.

$media_id is the post id of the attachment.

$download_meta = get_post_meta( $media_id, ‘_wp_attachment_metadata’, true);

echo $download_meta[filesize];

Cheers

Have you actually found that to be populated?

I’ve spot-checked half a dozen wpdb’s and none of them have ‘filesize’ values stored in _wp_attachment_metadata. I admit that most of the DB’s I’ve checked are very recent versions of WP, but regardless… for me that value never seems to be present.

I’ve also briefly pored over WP’s source and didn’t offhand see anywhere in core where that value is actively being set.

All of the media files I have are movies. mp4, wmv, mov, etc… There is meta data on all 8000 of them, yup!

Images might be another issue. But then again sorting images by file size seems kinda pointless to begin with.

Ah, interesting. Closer look at the WP source (still just skimming) and it does look like WP only populates filesize for audio-video stuff, but not for images. It may just be dumb luck that the DB’s I’ve checked only contained (thousands of) image files.

Anyway, it’s still a bit of a pain. Not that it can’t be done, but…

1. Hard to sort by a value lots of items won’t have, and
2. Hard to sort (via DB/wp_query, anyway) via a value contained in a serialized array.

if value exists, array it for the sort. if value ! exist, skip.

Just suggestions is all, you’re the plugin author. ??

FYI, we’ve got a new version currently undergoing testing that provides controls for number of posts per page, and also allows sorting by filesize (among a few other enhancements). Hopefully being released in the next few weeks.