Media Cleaner is a plugin designed to do one thing: check which files are not being used on your website so you can safely delete them and free up space on your server.

The plugin is divided into two parts: the Settings and the Dashboard. You can find detailed explanations for both sections in the documentation. The cleaning process will happen on the Dashboard.

This can be done in two ways:

• Clean Library Scan: This scan goes through your posts, and if a reference to a media file is found, that media is marked as “in use” — including all the thumbnails and sizes related to it. Even if individual sizes are not directly used, the media as a whole (as a library entry) is counted as used.

• Clean Uploads Folder Scan: This scan also goes through your posts but checks all file references at the file level. If a media file is in use but one of its thumbnails is not, the unused thumbnail will be detected. This scan checks all files physically present in your uploads folder — not just media, but any file.

You also have a few alternative tools for more specific maintenance tasks:

• Clean Duplicates: This tool scans all your system files and creates hashes (unique identifiers for the file’s exact data). It then compares these hashes to find duplicate files, allowing you to identify and safely delete duplicates.
• Optimize Thumbnails: This tool reviews your media entries and regenerates thumbnails if they don’t already exist. If it finds thumbnails that don’t match your current theme’s required sizes, they’ll be marked as issues, so you can delete unnecessary ones and keep your media library optimized.

PRO Version

The PRO version of Media Cleaner lets you use both the Clean Library Scan Scan and the Clean Uploads Folder Scan — the latter being exclusive to PRO users.

When you install the PRO version, things might not look very different at first, because most of the PRO features (except for the Uploads Folder Scan) work silently in the background. The plugin includes advanced parsers that analyze how third-party plugins use your media files.

The PRO version comes with over 70 of these parsers.

You can check the Parsers tab to see which plugins are supported and how Media Cleaner integrates with them.