Magento – Magento2 : Manage and understand images of deleted products behavior

catalog-optimizemagento-2.1magento2optimizationproduct-images

I'm trying to understand how M2 handle images of deleted products. If I delete a product (by admin or import/delete), all associated images in the media/catalog/product folder are still here.

In M1 and Magento Image Clean installed, I was able to remove all images of a deleted product. The same extension Magento 2 Image Clean for M2 fetch only 1 unused image.

After many reading, I found this Magento 2, How to delete unused images using PHP script. The solution seems to use the php bin/magento eav:media:remove-unused command of magento-hackathon/EAVCleaner but still only 1 image found (same that the previous extension).

I try a script on my own who scan the catalog_product_entity_media_gallery table, then scan the media/catalog/product folder to look for the difference but there is not. After digging into the database, I just realize that M2 keep records of old deleted product images in the DB.

Question is: how do you manage disk usage with all these useless images ?? My store has almost 4 collections/year and around 11.000 products to change… in only 6 months media/catalog/product folder size is around 6GB (without the cache) and still growing.

PS: I'm on a 2.1.9 version

Best Answer

After many hours of reading, digging and testing, I finally understood how Magento2 handle products images.

  • catalog_product_entity_media_gallery table content records of all images uploaded for products
  • catalog_product_entity_media_gallery_value_to_entity table content relation between products ID and associated images

Every extensions I found for cleaning the media/catalog/product folder does not work as I expect. (links in question)

They compare the media folder with the catalog_product_entity_media_gallery table.
=> Found only images without any records in the db but not deleted products one

I still don't unnderstand why Magento2 doesn't remove images while deleting product.

Based on EAVCleaner modified, I developed a new Command Line with my needs, result : 

Found 1,193.83 MB unused images in 6651 files

Flushing the images cache, Its finally 4,5gb saved after only 1 year in production...

I share my code on Github M2DeletedProductImage for those who are looking for the same behavior. (not 100% safe, still don't really know possible issues of deleting old images)

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