Welcome to WPML support. I'd be happy to help you with this.
It looks like the images are duplicated in the default language itself resulting in multiple image entries.
Does the duplication happen automatically or are there any steps that you think trigger the image duplication?
To debug this issue further, I would need to check your site settings once, for this I would need temporary access (wp-admin and ftp) to your site.
So could you please provide me with those details, you will find the needed fields for this below the comment area when you log in to leave your next reply. hidden link
I am running the scan as of now, since the files are in large numbers it will take some time to scan, I will also need your permission to delete unused media, please confirm that you have a backup.
At the same time, I created a test site with the media cleaner plugin and tried to see what would be the situations when the images aren't deleted and re-created and I found the issues exist in the following scenario
- Upload an image in the default language
- WPML duplicates the images into all 5 languages
- Media Cleaner shows the images aren't used, same media is shown 5 times if there are 5 languages available
- If we only remove 4 out of 5, on the next media synchronization, it will duplicate the images into 4 remaining languages and this is normal behavior.
What's the fix, if we remove media from all languages the issue doesn't exist and it doesn't show up again.
Also, since there is a large number of files present on your site, there is a chance the delete process is halted or corrupted in between so you are facing issues as you mentioned.
Hi Shekhar, although I appreciate the response I want to point out that we are a corporate level entity that has already tried much of what you have mentioned. Allow me to comment:
1.) I understand that WPML would duplicate an image into all 5 languages. Please see my original Youtube reference as well as my declarative that the SAME image is duplicated over 20,000-40,000+ times in some cases.
2.) I have mentioned that we successfully removed all of these images already. We did so over the span of 3 weeks, deleting and scanning 1000 at a time to confirm success. Restarting a scan will put this process in a loop when you could simply look at the Post ID's for the already scanned images.
Maybe it is the same image that get's caught in a loop from a specific originating page?
I tried to run the scan and waited a long time, but it was timed out and the results were unsuccessful. Is there any way to only run this scan for some batches so I can test this forward?
"You can use the filesystem scan mode and click on the button "create batch" and select a folder that has fewer media files so the scan takes less time if needed. Hope this helps."
I tried to run the plugin multiple times but due to the size of the images, it's not working, it's taking more than 3-4 hours to complete the scan and in the end it's stuck.
Being so, I tried to delete a few once that were added and decided to wait to see if they are listed again and the results are negative, I haven't re-runed the sync, that can be a reason too.
Since we aren't the one developing the plugin, it will be very hard for me to make this work unless they help or provide a way for it. I hope you understand this.
I found a similar ticket from the past where there was a suggestion to remove duplicated media using SQL so I suggest you to follow this to see if it works. Remember, this is not something properly tested so I wouldn't not recommended you to run these actions without a backup. https://wpml.org/forums/topic/delete-all-duplicated-media/#post-15450196
This may be relative to the substantial issue in another ticket that has been drug out for 7 days, so just dropping a note here to NOT close this ticket
