Bulk Deleting Confluence Page Attachments While Preserving Content

[Corentin_Hamel]

Hi everyone,

I'm facing a challenge with a Confluence wiki page that contains extensive research documentation for a customer project. The page has over 200 attached files, including multiple versions of some attachments.

The situation: Our customer has requested that we delete all related data we store for them. While we want to preserve our research findings and most of the content, we need to remove the numerous attachments from the page.

What I've attempted so far:

• Bulk deletion of attachments - Unfortunately, Confluence still doesn't support deleting multiple attachments simultaneously (which seems like a basic feature that should exist!)

• Page duplication - This copies all attachments along with the content, so it doesn't solve the problem

• Copy-paste to a new page - This approach is not working

What I'm looking for: Advice on efficient methods to remove all attachments and versioning from a Confluence page while keeping the page content.

Thanks in advance!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hey @Corentin_Hamel ,

You're correct - Confluence cloud currently does not support bulk deletion of attachments. There's a feature request related to it: CLOUD-12500: Bulk delete attachments 

Apart from manual deletion, an advanced approach would be to use REST APIs. That would need some customizations, and I haven't built anything like that myself 👀

I'm courious about this though:

Copy-paste to a new page - This approach is not working

What exactly isn't working in this scenario? If you copy content/page body (by going to page edit mode and copy&paste manually to new page) > it should definitely copy text w. actual attachments (e.g., images) and not the previous versions.

Another idea is to maybe use Confluence automation and build something like this, but I believe this would copy attachments as well.

An alternative would be to use a different action - Publish new page where you pull the body content from the trigger page.

Cheers,
Tobi

[Corentin_Hamel]

Thanks Tobi, for you reply.
When I was trying to copy/paste the whole content at once it would not work. Meaning not pasting anything. I think the problem was coming from the fact that I had some expandable items in the page.

What I did is multiple copy/paste of the different sections, which was really redundant but in the end did the job.

"There's a feature request related to it: CLOUD-12500: Bulk delete attachments"

last update on that ticket was more than 3 years ago!!

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Corentin_Hamel don't hold your breath on that ticket. Bulk editing in general is not high priority I would say.

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Corentin_Hamel our app Attachment Manager should help solve your problems.

Yes you can use automation but it's a blunt instrument. In theory does it, in reality easy to miss a variable etc, so it is ok for something simple but you are looking to do some more advanced things. One has to be careful when deleting needless to say.

[Corentin_Hamel]

Thanks I might try it next time!