NextGEN Gallery is one of the best, if not THE best image gallery plugins for WordPress. I’ve used it for years on many sites. However I’ve noticed a problem, a bug if you will, that leaves “orphaned” records in the WordPress database. I’ve reported this to Imagely.
Using NextGEN Gallery can leave orphaned records in the posts and posts meta database tables, especially if you add and delete galleries often. It appears to me that the orphaned records are created during upload, so if you add images often they will build up over time. I noticed this on a site where I upload hundreds of images a week and started noticing the database backups were extremely large. I started looking for what was causing the huge size of some of the tables and I found the issue.
I created this plugin to clean up the orphaned records. It analyzes the WordPress tables for orphaned records related to NextGEN and in the NextGEN specific tables as well. It then shows you the number of orphans in each specific table. The plugin will clean up these orphaned records (delete), if you click “Clean”, and then optimize the tables it cleaned.
WARNING – READ THIS!
I assume NO responsibility for any loss of data from using this plugin.
YOU SHOULD MAKE A FULL BACKUP BEFORE USING THE CLEAN FUNCTION, TO ALLOW RECOVERY IF THERE IS A PROBLEM.
Anytime you use a plugin that modifies the underlying WordPress database you should make a backup first. It is beyond the scope of this blog post to cover all the information you may need to backup and successfully restore database tables. However I recommend reading my blog post 27 Essential WordPress Plugins, and get whatever backup plugin I currently recommend. At the time of writing this, I recommend BackWPup. You can select to backup just the tables this plugin cleans: wp_ngg_album, wp_ngg_gallery, wp_ngg_pictures, wp_posts, wp_postmeta (note that the wp_ prefix may be different on your system). There is also a link in the post to a utility to help import large sql dumps (backups) if they fail.
Read my blog post: Handling Huge MySQL Database Table Exports/Imports/Backups for more info on dealing with large backups and restores of SQL databases and tables.
NOTE: The “Analyze” and “Clean” functions of this plugin can take A LONG TIME to execute, be patient, do not reload the page! The “Clean” function can take a VERY LONG TIME depending on how large and bloated the tables are!
Get it here: NextGEN Database Analysis and Clean-up Tool
Hopefully this plugin will help if you experience the same WordPress database bloat that I was experiencing. It should get your tables back to a manageable size.
Until next time,
Fred
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