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As we move on with our content-based websites, lots of images get dumped in our images folder, but we rarely come across self-committed monkyes that delete their files once they do not need it, which means, we end up with a huge list of images in one folder, and it is very tricky to clean it up. My question is (and i dont know if this is the right website to ask it), is there a tool that allows me to find out if an image has been requested by web in the last (n) months?

my other general question is, how do you do it? how do you take control of your images folders? what policy do you enforce on developers to clean up? what measures do you take in order to decide what goes and what stays if you end up with an out-of-control situation?

my suggestion was to rename the images folder, create a new one, copy the basic ones and wait for someone to complain about a broken image! :) i find this to be the most efficient.

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Try FlexTk file management toolkit, which is capable of performing rule-based file management operations.

Check this tutorial for more details:


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thanks everyone for your input on this

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Two simple ways to do what you want.

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It may not be elegant but what the systemadmin did when the folder was getting rediculously big was take a backup of the folder (yup, 12gb of publicity material) was sort all material by date last accessed, then date created, and delete any stuff older than 1 year. It's not quite what you want but it would work-ish.

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i tried sorting by last accessed date, it is not indicative of when the image was last consumed by web :( –  Ayyash Apr 13 '10 at 0:41
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no i wish i had a content management tool, its a remote server with 100s if sub sites, and 100s of teams working on it, but we were asked to reduce the size of the images folder, frankly i dont care about the other 100 teams that worked on this before so i would go to extremese in deleting them, but i want a reasonable rule to measure against, u know what i mean? so all ur methods are great but non of them work in my situation :) –  Ayyash Apr 13 '10 at 0:21
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