Magento2 : Manage and understand images of deleted products behavior?

Question

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

Answer 1

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)

Answer 2

Thank you for the M2DeletedProductImage solution, it worked perfectly for me.

Found 354495 files 23,698.23 MB

However this tool did not fix another issue I was looking the solution for. I have some entries in DB tables:

catalog_product_entity_media_gallery

catalog_product_entity_media_gallery_value

catalog_product_entity_media_gallery-value_to_entity

for products I deleted long time ago and also the images are not present in the pub/media/catalog/product.

I also checked the catalog_product_entity and this products do not exist.

In catalog_product_entity the smallest number for entity_id (Product ID) is 2168 (The same in Magento Admin) but in at least the 3 other tables mentioned above I have entries for more than 100 entity_id(s) from 1 to 2167.

How can I fix this?