[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #28235: No Warning for Bulk Media Deletions

[WordPress Trac]

#28235: No Warning for Bulk Media Deletions
--------------------------+-----------------------
 Reporter:  druesome      |       Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)  |      Status:  reopened
 Priority:  normal        |   Milestone:
Component:  Media         |     Version:  3.9.1
 Severity:  normal        |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                |     Focuses:  ui
--------------------------+-----------------------

Comment (by dllh):

 The case I've run into for this is unexpected but happens more frequently
 than you'd imagine. Users sometimes think that they can delete images from
 their media library without affecting the posts that use the images. This
 seems like a very weird conclusion to come to, but if you step back and
 think of it from the perspective of a user who doesn't understand how web
 apps work, it makes a certain bit of sense. For example, I can drag an
 image into Keynote or OpenOffice, and the image remains intact even if I
 remove it from the directory on my hard drive in which I originally stored
 it. The image is embedded in the document itself. This is the expectation
 some users have of images in WP posts. They think of the media library as
 a staging area more than as the bucket in which the images actually live.
 They reasonably enough think that once they add an image to a post, it's
 associated with the post and will permanently remain associated with the
 post.

 The lack of an alert here results in data loss for these users. They see,
 for example, that they're near the disk quota. Since they've already
 published posts using these old images, they figure they can bulk delete a
 bunch of images to clear up space. There's nothing telling them otherwise,
 and they delete the images. Now the posts that referenced the images are
 broken, and recovering the images is difficult at best, impossible at
 worst, and can be a lot of work in either case.

--
Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/28235#comment:9>
WordPress Trac <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/>
WordPress publishing platform