# Media Organizer at a glance
Media Organizer finds media files that are no longer used on your Joomla website and helps you remove them safely. For every file the extension shows *where* it looked, *what* it found and *why* the file counts as orphaned. So you decide on the basis of evidence — not on a guess.
Media Organizer is a pure administrator extension for Joomla 6 and produces no output in the frontend whatsoever.
The screenshots in this manual were taken on a German Joomla installation. The extension follows the language of your installation, so the labels appear in English on an English backend.
 The dashboard sums up the last scan: number of files, referenced and unreferenced files, space that could be freed, and the three reports.## Why cleaning up is safe here
Deleting media files is irreversible. The whole extension is therefore built around a single rule:
**Nothing is moved or deleted without a human having selected and confirmed it.**
That rule is not a promise but anchored in the code. In practice it means:
- **Quarantine is the normal case.** Files are moved to a protected folder and can be brought back at any time. Deleting for good is a separate, deliberate step.
- **A single gate protects deletion.** Before the final removal, twelve independent conditions are checked, plus a one-time confirmation token that binds action, user, scan and the exact file list together. There is no switch that bypasses it.
- **There is evidence for every classification.** For each file you see which search areas were checked, where the search happened and with what result — including links straight into the content that uses the file.
- **The extension knows its own limits.** If an installed extension is not covered, Media Organizer blocks the final deletion instead of risking a wrong one.
- **Nothing runs by itself.** The scheduled scan and the command line can *find and report*, but never delete. A scan writes nothing to the file system, ever.
- **Strictly local.** No external services are contacted. No data leaves your website.
## What Media Organizer finds
The search for references covers the usual hiding places:
- Articles and core content, including custom fields
- Modules — including the HTML of `mod_custom`, module parameters and folder parameters
- The version history of articles
- Templates and image paths hard-coded in CSS files
- Third-party extensions through vetted profiles
- A deep scan across the database as a safety net for everything else
## What else belongs to it
- **Duplicates** — files with identical content, detected by checksum
- **Broken references** — dead image links in your content
- **Optimisation report and image optimisation** — near-lossless, optionally through external encoders, every change reversible
- **Image editor** — crop, scale, rotate, convert to WebP
- **Command line** for scans, reports and maintenance
- **Scheduled scans** through the Joomla task scheduler, with email notification
- **404 monitoring**, which records accesses to files in quarantine — additional evidence before deleting for good
## How to read on
If you are starting out, this order works best:
1. [Requirements and installation](https://docs.graup-it.de/books/media-organizer-en/page/requirements-and-installation)
2. [Download key and updates](https://docs.graup-it.de/books/media-organizer-en/page/download-key-and-updates)
3. [Quick start: the first scan](https://docs.graup-it.de/books/media-organizer-en/page/quick-start-the-first-scan)
4. [The review view](https://docs.graup-it.de/books/media-organizer-en/page/the-review-view)
5. [Reading the evidence](https://docs.graup-it.de/books/media-organizer-en/page/reading-the-evidence-why-is-a-file-considered-orphaned)
6. [Quarantine, restoring, deleting for good](https://docs.graup-it.de/books/media-organizer-en/page/quarantine-restoring-deleting-for-good)
Applies to version 1.2.0.
[Deutsche Fassung](https://docs.graup-it.de/link/59)