WhatsApp Orphan/Unreferenced Media Cleanup

[WDS]

Hello All,

Can anyone help me with one problem, please? This is regarding WhatsApp media history. It is growing too large and consuming space with unnecessary media files.
I did "Clear chat" activity for some threads I believed were obsolete. But surprisingly, although chats were cleared, media files themselves were left untouched in the file system!

As a result I now have lots of orphan media files, which are not referenced in any WhatsApp chat. I cannot simply delete WhatsApp Media folder from the file system, as I have useful media there.

So my question: is there any way to scan the WhatsApp Media folder and delete orphaned/unreferenced media files?

I'm using Galaxy S8.

Thank you!

 

[iso.s]

I have exactly the same problem, also looking for a solution here.
If anyone have a clue on this, please share.

Thank you !

 

[theunf]

I'm on same page in 2019.

Whatsapp backup on android seems to do a differencial backup on all files of whatsapp folder and is always larger than whats being listed on Storage option.

My ratings are so bad: Storage says 17gb and backup says 60gb ;/

If I use file manager apps to delete dupes, some chats will not present the media.

It would be awesome to have an app to defrag whatsapp chats and media files.

 

[hassan987]

Hi. I have this problem too! Storage says 19GB but actually its taking up 38GB!

 

[NuttyBunny]

Count me in as well. 2.6GB vs 3.16GB. It may not seem much but it's on a Note 5 with just 32GB of storage and I'm trying to squeeze every available byte.

 

[RonAshman]

Just leaving my ward.
I managed to solve this manually. Kinda. It was hell. Still a lot of orphan files.

Hope someone has an answer.

 

[schaggo]

Just leaving my ward.
I managed to solve this manually. Kinda. It was hell. Still a lot of orphan files.

How did you manage to (partially) clean up manually?

 

[hassan987]

Any update on this issue ? Its driving me nuts having close to 20 gigs of unreferenced media in my phone.....I'm pretty sure Whatsapp can easily introduce a "cleanup" feature based on the same algorithm that generates the "storage" figure.

Once its done cleaning the Drive backup is as easy as deleting the old backup and creating a new one.

Question is what's the best way to submit this "feature request" which is in fact more like a bug report?

 

[RonAshman]

How did you manage to (partially) clean up manually?

I downloaded everything to my pc and looked for duplicates martching crc.
Then for like a week I went over pictures deleting the ones I was sure I didn't need, and also used the file name to divide them by year/month.

Not really the best option.

 

[theunf]

I'm in 2022 and with the same issue for years. Love to know who to code for Android/IOS and have Whatsapp integration options so I could search for each media file agains each group or direct channel to do :
- remove duplicated/triplicated media content by replace the file reference in groups/conversations ;
- than process all orphaned files that are not located in group/conversations discussion.