I have images in active listings which image management is showing as unused, and 'show listings' returns 'no listings found'.
When I delete images and they move to the deleted image folder they still show in listings on my PC even after I clear the image cache, and also the overzize image preview works too.
I have literally thousands of images uploaded, and I am wondering how on earth I am supposed to delete unused images. I can't do it as a listing ends, that's just ridiculous. Some lisitngs are shop listings, others on an auto-relist profile. Some I know are redundant as they re unusual objects, but a lot of the items are very similar and I cannot possibly rely on memory to deal with this even if the listings have only just ended!
If you go to the "Manage Images" page within your Auctiva account, you can tell how many active listings each image is being used in based on the value in the "Listings" column. If you are just looking to delete all of your images that are no longer being used in active listings, you should be able to delete any images that have a zero in the "Listings" column.
Also, when you delete images from the "Manage Images" page within your Auctiva account, we will keep them in the "Deleted Images" folder within your account for 7 days until we permanently delete them. If you would like them to be permanently deleted right away after marking them as deleted, you can then click the "View Deleted Images" button at the bottom of your "Manage Images" page and permanently delete them by using the "Remove Permanently" button on the ensuing page.
If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our customer support team by completing the web form on the following page of our site: http://www.auctiva.com/help/requesthelp.aspx
Thanks for the clarification and the examples. I'm not sure why that is happening, so I'm going to have to have our technical team look into your report. I'll follow up with you via this thread as soon as I am able to get some more information on this topic to share.
I got a response to my techincal help request. Apparently there is a known issue with this which has been reported by several users.
I imagine there are a lot more users who haven't reported this as deleting old pictures is not a priority for many users!
However I think that this is potentially quite a serious problem as users experiencing any difficulty with this will simply not bother to delete any unused images. If my case is typical this means that there are hundreds of megabytes of wasted server-space for each user, and it will get worse as time goes on. This will eventually become a major problem.
I speculate that the amount of undeleted images already accumulating might have some connection with the loss of image hosting services last weekend.
Even once the problem is addressed, there is still an issue with 'lazy' users. With no reason to spend time deleting old images there will be many who simply will not bother.
I think it will become necesary to introduce a purging regieme by where image files not used in listings will be automatically deleted after a period without user intervention. For example you could list images not used for six-months at login, and ask the user which (if any) are to be retained. Those which are not retained will be deleted one week later.
