Every older WordPress site I take over has the same uploads folder: years of images nobody uses, thumbnails for sizes the theme dropped long ago, duplicates uploaded three times under different names. Cleaning it up is the easy part. Being sure you're not deleting the hero image of some landing page is the hard part.

So I built AVAR Media Optimizer, free on wordpress.org. The whole idea is that it would rather ask you than guess.

- Usage scan sorts your media into Used, Unused and Verify manually. It looks in posts, pages, featured images, WooCommerce galleries, Elementor data, ACF and custom meta, widgets, options and more. Anything it isn't sure about lands in Verify manually instead of the delete list.

- Nothing is deleted right away. Media goes to a plugin trash (files, thumbnails and metadata) and you can restore it until you empty it.

- Disk scanner finds files that aren't in the Media Library at all: orphan files, stale thumbnails, leftover WebP/AVIF copies. You can delete them or adopt them back into the library.

- Duplicate detection by file content, so it catches the same image with different filenames.

- Local image optimization and resizing of oversized uploads, with a recovery copy of the original. WebP/AVIF generation if your server supports it.

- Images never leave your server. No cloud service, no account, no credits.

- Media Replace swaps a file but keeps the same attachment ID, so nothing breaks.

Honest limits: WebP/AVIF depends on your host's GD/Imagick, it needs PHP 8.1+, and no scanner catches every reference on heavily custom sites, so take a backup before a big cleanup. If you want a CDN or cloud compressor, Optimole or ShortPixel are a different kind of tool.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/avar-media-optimizer/

Curious what the scan finds on your sites. If it puts something in Unused that's actually in use, or something doesn't work the way you'd expect, tell me here or in the support forum on wordpress.org. I'm the only developer, so requests land straight on my desk and I'm happy to add what you need.

And if it saves you some disk space, a quick review on wordpress.org helps a small plugin more than you'd think. Feel free to pass it on to anyone fighting a bloated uploads folder.