Want to clean the WordPress Media Library up? If you’re looking for an easy-to-follow guide, keep reading. Here, I’ll show you six ways to clean the WordPress media libraries.

I know! When you manage a WordPress site or WooCommerce shop, you deal with hundreds of images. You’ve added them to your blog posts or widget areas. Do you know that they can have a negative impact on the performance of your website and its user experience?

It is wise to keep your media library organized. This will be useful in many situations. Continue reading to learn how to optimize your Media Library. Here, I will explain six popular ways to clean up your Wordpress Media Library.

Let’s first see why it is important to clean up the WordPress Media Library.

Why you should clean your WordPress Media Library

A clean media library will make your life much easier. A messy media library will not be good for you in the long term.

If you have multiple authors who are all constantly uploading files, it could take some time to find the right file.

Media organizing is the key. You can save space by cleaning up your media library, removing duplicates, and organizing it.

You now know why it is important to clean up your WordPress media library. Let’s now see how you can do it.

Use CatFolders to organize your media library.

Organizing your media library should be one of your first tasks. WordPress does not come with a media management feature by default. Uploading images, ZIPs, GIFs, or videos to the media library will look something like this:

You can’t find the images that you added to a particular post. It also looks cluttered. You can organize your media library to the next step with a powerful plugin such as FileBird or CatFolders.

How to do it? You can move image files into specific folders after installing and activating FileBird and CatFolders. In this demonstration, I’ll be using the CatFolders plugin.

This media organizer allows you to create an unlimited number of folders and then move images into them. The tool comes with a smart folder context menu that will enable you to select a specific folder action when right-clicking.

You can also create subfolders with the premium version. If you’ve made a folder for each image that you upload to your blog, you can then develop subfolders in order to give each blog post its own space. CatFolders offers a great feature.

Another notable feature of the plugin is the ability to find uncompressed/nonoptimized images. You can do this by going to the Tools for CatFolders section and enabling the Click to Generate Attachment Size option. Take a look at the image below!

You can now use the Sort by Filesize option in order to find and deal with larger images.

This feature generates a sortable WordPress Document Gallery at the front end of your website.

The visitors of your website can now sort the file types on your WordPress post/page by their sizes.

Sort media library by file size using FileBird

The media library cannot be sorted by file size, even though the details of the attachments show this attribute.

FileBird is a good solution for sorting large images.

You can select the Sort icon, choose Folders or Files, and then select a method of sorting.

As shown below, you can sort files in ascending or descending order based on their size.

The built-in sorting mode can be useful when you only want to optimize or resize large files. After you’ve completed this step, we can move on to the next one, which is resizing images.

Resize the Images

Next, you can resize images. WordPress has three default image sizes. You can view it in the Media settings.

Your theme will also include several other image sizes. Use 0 for the width and height if you don’t need any of these sizes.

Here’s a good example:

Save the settings after modifying the image size.

Compress the image files before uploading.

It is not advisable to upload images with large file sizes. Large files can slow your website down and take up more space on the server. Compressing images can be a great way to make the most of any web host that has a limited amount of disk space.

The tools can be used without having any technical knowledge. The tools will compress the image after you upload it. The optimized images can then be downloaded.

Manual image compression is difficult to automate. The manual method is not feasible if images have been uploaded to the media library and you need to optimize them.

The plugin method is the answer. After you install and configure an image compression plugin, you can concentrate on other tasks while the plugin handles the image compression.

The majority of these plugins (with certain limitations) are free. Use any of these tools to optimize the image size.

JPG Formats Are Better Than PNG

Image format is important. JPG pictures are better than PNG images. You can save a JPG image when you save a screenshot. If you have PNGs, you can use any online tool to convert them.

PNG2JPG has proven to be a great tool for converting images. You upload the PNG, wait for a few seconds, then download the JPG.

Use any online tool to complete the task.

Remove Duplicate Images

Delete duplicate images if you’ve uploaded the same picture multiple times. It is easy to delete duplicate entries. Select the image that you want to delete once you’ve opened the WordPress media gallery.

You can delete an image from your website by clicking the Delete button at the bottom-right corner.

You can remove duplicate images in this way.

Use a dedicated media cleaner plugin.

You can optimize your media library by using a plugin such as Media Cleaner. You can scan your media library after activating the plugin.

On the next page, the plugin will display the images that you have not used on your site.

You can delete images to save space, and you can also mark them. That’s it!

Wrapping up

As you can see, there are multiple ways to optimize and clean your WordPress media library. Using a media manager plugin such as FileBird or CatFolders is one of the best methods to follow. Both options will prove useful in the future.

Can also resize the images and compress them, reducing the amount of disk space required for the photos. It can be used to delete duplicate pictures. It is a media cleaner plugin. JPG format instead of PNG.

Here are the best ways to clean your WordPress media library. It’s great that I was able to help you keep your WordPress tidy. Do you have any other suggestions? Please let me know if you have any other methods!

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