Image Cleanup module for Magento 2

Purpose

When adding products in your webshop, eventually you'll also have to delete some of those products. But Magento doesn't remove images associated with the products that you delete.
So you'll have to manually delete them from time to time from disk, which is hard to do manually. This module gives you some options to delete those lingering unused images from the disk so you can recover some diskspace on your server.

Implemented Features

• It can find product image files on disk that are not referenced in the database and remove them
• It can do the same for the resized (cached) versions of those images
• It tries to not delete dynamically generated images files (like webp of avif files) if the original file is still being used, see configuration
• It can detect entire unused resized (cached) directories that are no longer valid and remove them with all the files in there, see below

Watch out

• The module will always first output what it will delete, make sure you check the entire list before confirming, so that you aren't removing files you don't want to remove. Do not test this module on a production environment first before you fully understand what it will do!
• This module hasn't been tested when your Magento shop is configured to store image files in the database, your mileage may vary when you use that way of working. Feel free to open issues in case any occur, and we'll see if we can fix something...

Compatibility

• This module should work with Magento 2.3.4 or higher
• The module should be compatible with PHP 7.3, 7.4 and 8.1

Installation

You can use composer to install this module:

composer require baldwin/magento2-module-image-cleanup

Or download the code and put all the files in the directory app/code/Baldwin/ImageCleanup

After which you can then activate it in Magento using:

bin/magento setup:upgrade

Usage

There are 2 command line commands you can use execute:

• bin/magento catalog:images:remove-unused-hash-directories
• bin/magento catalog:images:remove-unused-files

Both commands have some extra options:

      --no-stats        Skip calculating and outputting stats (filesizes, number of files, ...), this can speed up the command in case it runs slowly.
  -n, --no-interaction  Do not ask any interactive question

The -n option can be used if you want to setup a cronjob to regularly call these cleanup commands, it will not ask for confirmation before removing files, and will just assume you said 'yes, go ahead' (which can be dangerous!)

The module will output all the paths it deleted in a log file {magento-project}/var/log/baldwin-imagecleanup.log so you can inspect it later in case you want to figure out why a file got removed.

Performance-wise, it's adviced to first run catalog:images:remove-unused-hash-directories before catalog:images:remove-unused-files because the first one could already remove a bunch of files that the second one might also find.

Configuration

There is a configuration section in the backoffice under: Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Product Image Cleanup Settings

• List of dynamically generated image file extensions: Some Magento shops might have modules installed to dynamically generate webp or avif image files out of the original product image files. These files are usually not referenced in the database of Magento so by specifying those file extensions in the configuration, we can prevent them from being deleted accidentally. The module will still be able to remove those type of files when the original file is no longer referenced in the database.
  This feature only works properly when the dynamically generated image files use the same filename as the original file, so they can only be different in the file extension being used.

Documentation about resized/cached directories

Magento saves resized product images in certain directories in pub/media/catalog/product/cache The directory names are basically an md5 hash of a bunch of parameters like: width, height, background-color, quality, rotation, ... (which tend to be defined in the etc/view.xml file of themes) Sometimes, Magento tweaks how the hash gets calculated in certain newer versions of Magento, or your theme changes some parameter which both can make those hashes no longer being used.

This module has the option to detect such directories and can remove them together with all the files in there.