Please provide some way to track asset usage

[darylknight]

One of the first questions most of our clients ask after having their site live for a little while is "How can I tell which assets are being used?" - so they know what can be deleted, or which of 8 identical images are actually being used after a designer uploaded multiple very similar versions of an illustration. This gets a lot worse the older a site gets, and have no way to track which images are still being used.

There's been a plugin around (Asset Usage) for a long time, but since about 3.2 (the big overhaul to revisions, live preview and drafts) it's never been able to accurately tell you whether an asset is used or not.

Would you consider adding something like this to Craft core? Specifically using Asset fields and relations - I know it'd be a pain in the ass to track things like images inside redactor fields, but anything would be better than nothing, given that we always disable the image button in Redactor.

[brandonkelly]

My concern is, without tracking usages within Redactor/CKEditor fields, users would start deleting assets that don’t seem to be in use, which will end up breaking the Redactor/CKEditor fields.

I think the solution is that Redactor/CKEditor need to start storing relations for any elements they’re referencing, just like relational fields. Then we’d be able to accurately show all usages for any given asset.

[darylknight]

That sounds like a good idea. Is it likely to be implemented?

[brandonkelly]

Added to our 5.0 project! https://craftcms.com/roadmap

[gbowne-quickbase]

The https://plugins.craftcms.com/element-relations?craft4 by internetztube Frederic Köberl already does look into redactor fields if you need it now

[mathijsbrand]

So what is the status for Craft CMS 5 on this one?
I don't see this issue on the roadmap. And the elements-relations plugin doesn't work on Craft CMS 5.

[LucasPoignonnec]

Hello!

Are there any plans in the near future to make tracking asset usage part of Craft core?

We are in a similar case as the original author, currently using the plugin 'Asset Usage', however it is no longer maintained according to the plugin store.
We also consider using the 'Element relations' plugin, however this could also lose support in the future.

As this feature is requested by quite a lot of our clients, a more permanent solution would be amazing.

Thank you for your feedback.

[brandonkelly]

Getting closer to being able to resolve this in Craft 5.3, as we’re adding the framework for giving CKEditor fields the ability to store relations for any images they embed (#15400).

[kbergha]

It should add relations to any asset that is linked to (typically documents), not only those that are embedded.