Removing unneeded images

[drs02040]

When editing my homepage, I noticed a growing list of old images when I click on "Insert Image." How do I remove the ones I don't want anymore? When I try to do that, the image is immediately inserted instead.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @drs02040 ...

There is a paid add-on from the folks at Cidi Labs called TidyUP which helps you do file clean-up...such as identifying unused files in your course.  You might want to take a look at that solution...or at least mention it to your school's Canvas admin team so they can look into it.

[James]

@drs02040 

I don't use TidyUp, but what @Chris_Hofer was talking about often used to clean up courses of orphaned content -- content that is no longer used, but people may not know about.

If you already know which images you don't want to keep, then you can manage them through the Files. The Canvas Basics Guide has a lesson called How do I delete a file or folder in Files?

You'll need to identify whether the files are your user files or course files. You probably know this because when you go to embed a file on a page, it asks where you want to get them from. If you're not sure, you can go to your Account from the global navigation menu and choose Files. The My Files are your files and then each of the active courses for you is shown under that.

Be careful deleting things. If you are actually using the image somewhere, then removing it will break that content. If you use user images and your institution doesn't delete content after a set period of time, you may be deleting files that were used years ago. That may or may not be an issue if you ever need to go access that course again.

On the other hand, if you're looking at course files, then you can certainly delete anything that isn't used within that file. I get some of that build-up where I have an assignment one term but then swap it out for something new in the new term. Even if I delete the assignment I'm not using anymore, any images or other files get left and then just copied from term to term.

Other than making it harder to find the image you want, there's nothing necessarily terrible with having orphaned course files. They only count against the file quota the first time they are uploaded (not when they are copied to a new course). However, it will shrink the size of course exports and make navigating through things a little easier. I definitely would encourage cleaning up unused files, but with the warning to make sure they are really unused. There's no built-in way to know where files are used or how many times they're used, which is where the TidyUp program that Chris mentioned comes in handy.