I’ve been given the directive to “retire” about 1000 articles from a wordpress site I maintain. Deleting the posts from the DB is trivial, but how would one go about deleting the orphaned files from the uploads folder?
How to delete orphan attachments?
Try plugin called ‘Media Cleaner‘. It’s seriously made (the author, tigroumeow, mention 5+ time “do a backup before use”) + upload Janitor was last time updated 10 years ago.
take a look at Upload Janitor plugin.
its a plugin i use to clean up unused images and other files from your uploads folder.
but just in case make a backup of your uploads directory first