A free tool for a problem every WordPress site eventually has
Today we are releasing AssetDrips v1.0 — a free, open-source WordPress plugin to find, organise and optimise large media libraries, non-destructively.
If you have run a WordPress site for any length of time, you already know the problem. The media library starts as a tidy grid and slowly turns into a swamp: tens of thousands of files, no folders, weak search, duplicates from three redesigns ago, and a wp-content/uploads directory that has quietly ballooned to gigabytes nobody can account for. AssetDrips is the tool we kept wishing existed, so we built it.
Why we built it
The native WordPress media library was designed for small sites and never really grew up. Search is shallow, there is no folder structure, and every query crawls wp_posts and serialized wp_postmeta — which is exactly why the library page gets slower the more you upload.
The plugins that try to fix this usually make a different trade you do not want: they move your files into real folders (breaking URLs), delete media you might still be using, or ship your images off to a paid third-party API for optimisation. We wanted something safer. The guiding principle for AssetDrips is simple: every destructive action keeps a restorable backup, and nothing leaves your server.
Four tools, one index
On activation, AssetDrips builds a denormalized assetdrips_media index in the background. Everything after that reads one fast indexed table instead of crawling the WordPress core tables — which is how the whole thing stays quick on libraries with tens of thousands of attachments. On top of that index sit four tools.
Sift — find what nobody is using
Sift detects media with no references anywhere on the site, with confidence tiers so you can tell "definitely unused" from "probably unused," and coverage detection that is honest about its own blind spots. Crucially, cleanup does not delete — it moves files to a reversible quarantine with one-click restore. You get your storage back without the 2 a.m. panic of having nuked an image that turned out to be live.
Find — search that actually finds
Find turns the index into fast, faceted search: by filename, alt text, type, size, dimensions, orientation, uploader or date — and by usage, so you can ask "what is used on this page." Filters combine, results paginate, and you can save smart views. A "Health slice" shows indexed, missing-alt and unused counts at a glance.
Sort — organise without moving a thing
Sort gives you hierarchical virtual folders, tags and bulk metadata editing — all metadata-only and fully reversible. Zero file moves, so no URLs ever break. Select a filtered set, bulk-edit alt text, titles, captions and descriptions, and impose order on the chaos without touching a single path on disk.
Squeeze — optimise images locally
Squeeze recompresses JPEGs and PNGs, generates WebP and AVIF as additive sibling files (your originals are never replaced), resizes oversized originals, and audits thumbnail sizes. Next-gen formats are served transparently through a PHP filter with no URL changes, and AVIF/WebP support is verified with a live encode probe rather than assumed. It is local-first — Imagick or GD on your own server, no third-party API calls, no per-image fees.
Safe by design
The theme running through all four tools is reversibility. Sift quarantines instead of deleting. Sort never moves a file. Squeeze adds formats beside your originals rather than overwriting them. Every destructive action keeps a restorable backup. That is what lets you actually use a cleanup tool on a production site instead of cloning to staging and losing your nerve.
For the engineers
AssetDrips is pure PHP with a PSR-4 autoloader and no third-party runtime dependencies. It needs WordPress 6.0+, PHP 8.1+, and ImageMagick or GD for optimisation. Everything in the UI is also available through resumable, scriptable WP-CLI commands — wp assetdrips index, wp assetdrips scan, wp assetdrips squeeze and size audits — so you can wire it into deploys and cron. It is licensed GPL-2.0-or-later, the same as WordPress itself.
Get it now
AssetDrips v1.0 is available today on GitHub. Grab the release ZIP and install it through the WordPress plugin uploader, or clone the repo and run composer install --no-dev:
github.com/CodeDrips/assetdrips
It is open source and free to use. If you try it, we would love your feedback and issues on the repo.
And if your media library is just one symptom of a WordPress site that has outgrown its foundations, that is the kind of work we do. Get in touch to talk about a rebuild, a headless migration, or a custom plugin of your own.
