Cleaning up images (or other files) in the custom folder

Question

I'm wondering if anyone else has come up with a good way to manage their custom files (where documents and images which are attachments to contact records are stored.)

We have a fair amount of files in this folder. In addition, some of the contact images have been 'deleted' in Civi (i.e. mistakenly uploaded and replaced with a new image or updated with a newer image.)

Any way to cull through the files and remove files no longer in use? Or to separate contact record images from pdfs attached to activity records?

Answer 1

Might justify developing a script or extension?

• The column uri in the database table civicrm_file seems to refer to these.
  • The table civicrm_entity_file then links civicrm_file records to other existing entities.
• The column image_URL in the table civicrm_contact, on my transplanted legacy installation at least:
  • in some cases contains absolute URLs that also reference files in this folder,
  • and in others contains URLs to civicrm/contact/imagefile with a photo parameter that is a filename in this folder.

So you may be able to identify unreferenced files that way, although I won't guarantee that files in that folder can't be referenced from elsewhere too.