WPML “translates” pictures.

Our site is multi-lingual. Many articles are translated into English, French, German, Arabic etc.

The default way to translate articles and ensure each translation is “connected” to the other in a visible way is the WPML translation editor. The problem – it creates a “copy” of the article in the target language AND a copy of any pictures \ media files within the article.

Thousands of articles and tens of thousands of translations later, that’s a huge volume of media impacting the site speed and hosting charges. Totally pointless at that, as we generally manually copy the pictures from the original to the translation.

We’re interested in moving the site to a new host, and the size of the media library is becoming a major issue.
(There’s also the issue of duplicate pictures uploaded by contributors, and possibly automatically compressing really huge picture files, as we rarely post them in resolutions that matter, but that’s less urgent).

Is there a way to delete all the “translated” pictures without impacting the original? And to stop WPML from translating pictures in the future?

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]