How to delete images permanently from the entire project folder

[Ann-kathrin5F8D]

Hi, our teams uses RoboHelp (2017) for quite a long time now and our projects contain many many topics and also images and are updated regularly (new segments, new images, new topics). From time to time, of course, we replace outdated images with new ones.

What we do is: we delete them in the editor of the topic and just save it. However, the images are still existent in the local project folder. We just noticed that, so the simplest workaround (any time you delete an image in RoboHelp, make sure to delete it in the local folder as well) doesn't work.

As a result, we have a lot of files in the local project folder which are not needed anymore.

How can we delete the images for good? Is there a special setting or workaround?

Or maybe, is there a view, pod or any way to see which image files are really used within the project topics (so that we can manually delete all the others)?

Gracteful for any hints regarding this issue.

Best regards

Ann-Kathrin

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

Unused FIles should help.

Make sure you backup your project first in case you delete something you didn't mean to.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[Ann-kathrin5F8D]

Thanks for this, Peter. In all the years using RoboHelp, we didn't know that this window (Unused files) existed. Thank you! That helps a lot!

[Amebr]

I'd add further caution to Peter's suggestion.

Always double-check that a listed file really isn't required.

For example the apj and brs files generally are required. Or maybe you have baggage files that you don't link to but want to distribute with your help; those show up as unused. Or if you reference background images in your stylesheet, those images will show up as unused.

A handy tip is if it's a normal, non-Robohelp file (pdf, image, doc etc), and it doesn't appear anywhere in the Project Manager pod, it should be okay to delete. (Although I admit, browsing through the folder structure of a large project can be tedious...) 

[Ann-kathrin5F8D]

Thanks for your answer. You're absolutely right.

But fortunately we already know the RoboHelp file extensions and for what the specific files are needed, so I would (as you suggested) only delete the unused image files (png/jpg format).

And I came across another useful search option. You can search specific file names "in the source code" and if there is no match in the project, you know that the file is really not used in the html files.