Manual talk:FindOrphanedFiles.php

Use case and remediation of orphaned images

I recently discovered this script. What is the typical use case for it, and more importantly, what is the most appropriate remediation method for images found to be orphaned? I already have a weekly cron job that runs the checkImages.php script (due to an issue a few yeras ago), but I'm wondering about the value of setting up a cron job to run this script for routine maintenance. However, I'm very surprised to find so many orphaned files in my wikis. Our largest wiki (or rather, my dev copy of it) reports about 122k uploaded files via Special:MediaStatistics, but this script finds almost 48k orphaned files, which is quite shocking. As such, I'm digging deeper into this "issue", so I was hoping to get some additional insight here. Justin C Lloyd (talk) 23:15, 10 December 2024 (UTC)