Media cleaner does not work for web images

Do you upload webp directly to the Media Library?

During the scan, it shows all webP images not attached, whether they are attached.

What do you mean exactly by attached?

Okay, let me make you understand, I am using media cleaner for removing all unattached images (images that are not attached to my website but available in my WordPress media library). The scan works well for jpeg and png images but doesn’t work for webP images. that means it scans all webP images and shows unattached to any post but those are attached images.

Here, attached means images that are attached to my post and pages and unattached means those are not in use but available in the WordPress media library.

Moving to your next question- I don’t upload webP directly to the media library but i convert them using a WordPress plugin called W3 total cache.

I hope you got it

When you say unattached, you mean unused?

You are using the Media Library scan or the Filesystem Scan? I don’t see how you could see WebP images by using the Media Library scan.

In WordPress, attached means simply that the user decided that a specific image in the Media Library is linked to a Post/Page (but that doesn’t mean it’s actually used by it, and it might even be used by another page). It’s important to be careful with those words, and not mix them ?? Otherwise that will be very difficult to understand the issue.

Hi Jordy.
I am not the original poster, but I want to follow up on this. I am looking into using Media Cleaner for a site I started working on a while ago. I inherited it, and (as you can imagine) the media archive is a mess from the previous 6 years of use (and misuse).

What I wonder about here are your statements about WebP images.

Since I started working on the site I have created and uploaded images in WebP format to my media archive. The format is supported by WP natively now, and most browsers support it as well, and they are smaller than other formats, so in some cases I have used them. GIMP supports their creation and they work just fine in WP.

Given that, I don’t understand why a Media Library Scan wouldn’t find them. In my case I have pages that display those images in the system. Many such pages, in fact.

Now, I can’t learn anything real just yet. The site uses Elementor, and I will have to purchase the Pro version to be able to do anything useful. I am working on that. But since I saw this I want to clarify… is there some issue with WebP images and Media Cleaner?

Again, in my case there are files named things like foo.webp uploaded into the media archive and linked (using img tags) in actual pages on the site. I would think those would be found with both a media scan and a file system scan. Am I not understanding something correctly?

Thank you!

Hi @jrpstonecarver, @amitchahariit,

Indeed, in some analysis cases, WebP was not taken in account. I worked on better WebP support and it should be now exactly as powerful as with other types of images ??

Please try it, the new version is 6.3.2.

Excellent news, though if my request caused more work for you I apologize.

This week is a mess, but I will probably wind up trying media cleaner on our staging site next week. You’ll see the purchase go through in a few days, I think.

Thanks much!

No problem at all @jrpstonecarver, it’s my job and pleasure to make this plugin better and more awesome every day ?? I am always glad to receive bug reports and feedback, no worries! Let me know how it goes when you have time.

@tigroumeow As promised, I just installed the Pro version of media cleaner.

I have a lot to figure out… a media library scan shows nearly 300 issues, and a filesystem scan shows nearly 400. This doesn’t surprise me, but it’s a lot to figure out and paw my way through. I’ll get there.

So far I see no issues with webp files. I know a number of them that I use are not showing up in either scan, so it seems media cleaner thinks they are in use. That is good.

If I may, I have another thought. I have only one site that I am using this plugin for, but I have 2 versions of it: the production version and the staging version. I don’t load new plugins directly into the production version for obvious reasons. I test on the staging site (which is all I have done with media cleaner so far) before loading a plugin on the production site and using it for real.

Your license terms are a bit of a challenge in my case. A license for one site would only let me use the tool on one site, not both. But they sort of are the same site… just one is for real and one is not.

I have no idea if there is a good way to support this and deal with licensing in a way that would work for me. If our site was named example.com, our staging site would be stage1.example.com. So a subdomain in this case. But others might do something different, and not all subdomains would be staging sites.

In any case, to make this work on both sites I bought the 5 site license, but for small users like me either a 2 site license or a way to have a single site license deal with both production and staging might be a useful addition to your licensing options.

In any case, it will take me some serious time to go through all of this and really understand things. I am something of a WP newbie in any case, so this is… “fun”. Should I encounter problems, I will file another bug report here.

Thanks very much.