Discovery on images accidentally deleted!

This is a help topic to anyone who has had issues with images that are in use, being accidentally deleted. The plugin is fantastic, and this is in no way criticism of the plugin. Rather some helpful info.

SITUATION: I had a WooCommerce site that we ran MEDIA CLEANER plugin on that found over 50,000+ unused images for a very large store with over 10,000 products. I did a backup, ran the scanner, ran the deletion process (which put them into the ‘trash’), spot checked for missing images, and everything appeared fine.

Came to discover the following were missing:

1. Site logo: any images you upload and use in your theme are a potential risk for deletion. Ensure you have a backup.

2. Slider revolution images: Images that were used in slider revolution were accidentally deleted. Moving forward I am going to ensure to export a copy of all sliders for easy restoration if needed.

3. Previously migrated product images: This particular store was originally using a different shopping cart system some years ago, and was migrated over using a service to WooCommerce. Those images from the migration were placed into /wp-content/uploads/cm/ folder that the migration team created. Even though they were used by the products, the plugin still didn’t recognize them as being in use. So I had to grab a backup to restore of that /cm/ folder to resolve.

In this case I don’t blame the plugin, as its most likely the past migration team missed some important record that normally happens when its uploaded via product edit screen.

I hope this information helps some people moving forward. When then plugin warns you to ensure you do a backup first, absolutely do so :). At the very least, ensure you have a backup of your logo, sliders, and if you migrated from another system, verify if the images are in a custom folder and if so ensure to back that up too.