WordPress image audit plugin · see what is actually in your media library

Most image libraries were not built in one sitting. They accumulate across several people and several years, and then somebody inherits one and has to answer questions about it: how much of this is missing alt text, how much of it is far larger than the site will ever display, how much of it is broken, and how much of it does anything still refer to. WordPress answers none of those. The Media list tells you a file name, who uploaded it, and when, and everything else means opening attachments one at a time. On a library of a few thousand nobody does that, so the questions stay unanswered.

This plugin answers them. It reads your library, reports what it found, and says plainly what it could not determine. The only thing it ever writes is alt text, and only when you type it.

What you get

• Alt text, dimensions and file size on the Media list. Alt text is editable in place, so working through two hundred images stops being two hundred page loads. File size sorts, which brings the enormous photograph somebody dropped into a post years ago straight to the top.
• Filters for the images that need work. Missing alt text, oversized originals, large files, and images whose file has gone missing from the server entirely.
• Alt text included in the Media search. WordPress searches titles, captions and file names but not alt text, which is often the only place the subject of a photograph is written down.
• Where images are used. Every image against the places a reference was actually found: featured images, post content, custom fields, site settings, theme files.
• About this library. What it weighs, how much of that is sizes WordPress generated rather than files anybody uploaded, image files sitting in the uploads folder that no attachment accounts for, likely duplicates, and how many images arrived with no uploader recorded.
• A reading kept for each day you open it, so the numbers can be compared over time, downloadable as a spreadsheet for any date range you ask for.

Who it’s for

• Agencies and developers taking over a site somebody else built
• Anyone working through accessibility obligations, where alt text coverage has become a compliance question rather than a nicety
• Editors who have several hundred images to describe and would rather not open several hundred pages to do it
• Anyone who suspects their uploads folder is bigger than it should be and wants to know why before touching anything

How to install and verify

1. Install and activate. Nothing needs configuring first.
2. Go to Media, then Image Support. It opens on what it found in your own library.
3. Use the button there to open your images. It sends you to the Media list deliberately: WordPress shows Media as a grid by default, and a grid has no columns, so none of this appears there.
4. To check it is doing something, filter the list to images missing alt text and count the rows. That number is the job, and it has an end.

On a site you have just taken over, that whole sequence is safe. You can install it and look around before you have decided anything, because nothing it does touches a file.

What it doesn’t do

• It doesn’t change your files. Nothing is renamed, resized, converted, moved or deleted.
• It never says an image is unused. The strongest claim it makes is that no reference was found, and it names what it cannot see: page builders that keep layouts in their own tables, shortcodes resolved at render time, anything a plugin stores privately. Check before you delete.
• It sends nothing anywhere. No external requests, no analytics, no licence checks. It works with the server unplugged from the internet.
• It only concerns itself with images. Documents, audio and video raise different questions and deserve their own tools.

File details

• Version: 1.6229
• Format: WordPress plugin, installed from the plugin directory or as a .zip
• License: GPL-2.0-or-later
• Tested with: WordPress 7.1 · PHP 7.4 and above
• Source: public on GitHub, issues and suggestions welcome

Other downloads from this practice

• WordPress WebP Plugin. Auto-convert new image uploads to WebP.
• WordPress SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) (SVG) Plugin. Safe SVG uploads in the Media Library, with sanitisation.
• WordPress HEIC Plugin. Auto-convert iPhone HEIC photos on upload so the page actually renders.

Common questions

I installed it and cannot see anything. Where is it?

Two things are probably going on. There is no top-level menu, because the plugin adds columns to the Media list rather than a screen of its own. And WordPress shows Media as a grid by default, where there is no table and so nothing to add columns to. Go to Media, then Image Support, and use the button there.

Will it delete anything?

No, and it has no code that could. It reports what it found and leaves every decision to you. That is deliberate: the usual failure in this category is a tool that confidently removes a file something was still using.

What happens to my alt text if I remove the plugin?

It stays. Alt text goes into the field WordPress has always used, exactly where the attachment editor and every other plugin looks for it. Uninstalling removes only the plugin’s own index, its two settings, and the daily readings it kept.

Does it work on a large library?

The columns and the alt text filters are ordinary database queries and scale fine. The scans that have to read image metadata or walk the uploads folder are bounded and cached, and the page says so when it has looked at a slice rather than everything. It was built against a library of 766 images and the full measurement takes about a second.

Why not just use the “Unattached” filter WordPress already has?

Because it answers a different question than people think. WordPress records how a file was uploaded, not how it is used. Measured on a real library, nearly a quarter of “unattached” images were live on the site, and 86 attached images were absent from the post they were attached to. So this plugin goes looking for the reference itself instead.