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 of Media Organizer with key figures on files, references and reports — 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:

Applies to version 1.0.5.