What does 'File usage' do in file manager?

Quick question - what does the ‘File usage’ option available against each file in file manager actually do? I have files that are definitely being used on the front-end of my site/s in a variety of ways, but the ‘File usage’ window shows no details.

I have to be honest, I’ve never really looked at this before, but a client wants to do a file cleanup, and this feature would be really useful if I could get it to work accurately.

Anyone any ideas?

Many blocks that pick files individually (content, image, sliders/galleries with file pickers) track what is picked in File Usage.

However, file usage can’t be relied upon because files are also often used as ‘Everything in a fileset’ or ‘Everything in a folder’ or lists filtered from such. There are also blocks that don’t implement file usage.

Hence file usage cannot be relied on for cleaning up unused files. It is better limited to generating statistics of the kind ‘>= this many uses’.

The best way to do a cleanup of files is to have a rigorously applied approach to organising them in the first place. That is probably a bit too late if a user has been sloppy about uploading files and now wants to clean them up.

If there are many file versions, my Extreme Clean addon can slim down old versions.

Thanks for the reply John.

I’ve had more of a play around with the file usage feature now, and I can see how it would be useful in some cases, but yeah it certainly won’t do what we need, not to worry.

… + I am yet to meet any Admin who is that rigorous with their file organisation! :slight_smile: