How to bulk delete Confluence attachments

[Adelia Damayanti]

Hi, I need to delete hundreds of attachments on my confluence page. Now I am deleting them one by one and it's very painful and time-consuming. I found this tutorial video on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFZP8cmzm2Y&t=79s) that shows there was actually a bulk delete button. However, I could not find it on my confluence. Has the feature been deleted? Thank you

[Anthony Pearson]

'Painful and time-consuming' that's Confluence. There's no native bulk delete, and no native way of identifying orphan attachments. Confluence doesn't delete attachments when you remove them from a page - which is a pretty massive problem. If you think you've removed something for IG or compliance issues, you haven't. We're in the process of writing a script to add labels to orphans, and then delete. So, DIY or buy a tool. Don't expect Atlassian to do anything about it. Salty? Me?

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Anthony Pearson we wrote technical notes about how attachments work in Confluence as it is complicated and our app Attachment Manager while it can do bulk actions like deleting and downloading has to work within Confluence rules.

Yes you remove an attachment from a page and it is not completely deleted. This is to support page history and compliance. We are all conditioned by Microsoft to think it must work like Word, so it's a pain as users are confused but it has tangible long term corporate advantages which makes Confluence worthwhile.

This is why our app has filters. Some use cases.

Unused = does not appear on a page but still saved

Current version = so can download only current versions in bulk

Old versions = to delete all the older versions if you do not need to keep them for compliance or want to save space

Filter by videos = large files that quickly free up space and can boost Confluence performance

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Adelia Damayanti quickly bulk delete attachments with our new app Attachment Manager by Easy Apps. One of the many features.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

No, there's nothing removed from Confluence.

The video is an advert for an app that adds bulk delete to Confluence.

[Ashley Thomas]

Hi Adelia,

The YouTube video you linked is showing the capability of a marketplace app called "Page Assistant", which can be found on the marketplace here: Page Assistant | Atlassian Marketplace

This app is only available for the server versions of Confluence.

For Cloud I would suggesting looking at "Attachments Manager for Confluence": https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1222381/attachments-manager-for-confluence?tab=overview&hosting=cloud

I do have one warning about attachments manager; we recently used it to remove a lot of 'unused' attachments from our site (with this apps built in function) and unfortunately it deleted a large amount of attachments that we did not want deleted. When it finds the 'unused' attachments it only searches the body of the Confleunce page, and the attachments we had were either linked to other plugins (draw.io) or within the comments.