[Django]-Django delete unused media files

django-unused-media will help you to clean old unused media by management command.

Very useful when you just started to use django-cleanup and already have files which needs to be deleted.
Or if you have thumbnails which needs to be deleted from media directory.

Perhaps this is a bit late, but if you also want to know more about the problems that can appear with deletion, here’s an article which explains how to delete them in two ways (with code snippets).

There is a management command which can be called every now and then, and a more “immediate” solution, using signals.

You can use signals. Than use os.remove() to clean up related files on delete.

This way your file system always reflects you db. No need for hitting some button.

The following is how I currently do it with Django 1.7 which need to be used from the start I don’t know how you clean up unreferenced files in retrospect.

Say you’ve got an app named ‘cars’ and a model named ‘Car’.

signals.py:

# cars/signals.py

from django.conf import settings
from django.dispatch import receiver
from django.db.models.signals import post_delete

from cars.models import Car

# By adding 'Car' as 'sender' argument we only receive signals from that model
@receiver(post_delete, sender=Car)
def on_delete(sender, **kwargs):
    instance = kwargs['instance']
    # ref is the name of the field file of the Car model
    # replace with name of your file field
    instance.ref.delete(save=False)

apps.py:

# cars/apps.py
from django.apps import AppConfig

class CarConfig(AppConfig):
    name = "cars"
    def ready(self):
        import cars.signals

__init__.py:

default_app_config = 'cars.apps.CarConfig'