Life saver

I was pulling my hair out looking at raw database dumps lamenting the fact that WordPress does not bake in a way to see where each media asset is used.

Then I thought, “There must be a plugin for that,” and found this, which works great for me.

One thing I notice is that it does not work on some early posts and imported posts. For me this was about 6-8 images out of 400. Those were easy enough to track down.

There are a few more it won’t find because they aren’t in the database – the image on my custom 404 page, for example. Here again, I wish that WordPress would just do like Drupal and let you create a regular page and, in the settings, designate it as a 404 page (Drupal has methods for keeping the server load light for 404s even though they are full pages). But, since it’s hardcoded and that info is not in the DB, obviously no plugin can figure that out.

So to those who are saying it shows some or a lot of unused images, that’s probably a result of the way your images are added to posts. When I looked at posts that I knew used images that where flagged as unused, all I had to do was add the image again, using the standard Add Media button and this plugin instantly picked it up.

So, yes, it did not catch 100% of the images. Still, for me, this has been a huge time saver.

And guys… it’s free. Volunteer labor created this. Thanks Sergey!!