Find unused images in your app

Have an app with unused images you want to clean up? If you've dynamically composed image names in your application code, you won't be able to scan for unused images with a simple git grep. Instead, look at the atime on your images. Note the time, exercise your application, and then look at the atimes of files. Files that haven't their atimes updated weren't accessed in the course of your test. Review them and see if you can safely delete them.

Here's how I did this on a rails app recently:

Note the time &/ ls -ult app/assets/images. Wait a minute.

Crawl your site and exercise logged-in functionality with wget and your browser tests respectively.

wget -r -k -p -np -e robots=off http://localhost:5000/
rake spec:features

Check the atimes of your images again: ls -ult app/assets/images

At the end of this process I used the process suggested in this pivotal blog post, looping over the end result with git grep to double check that none of my candidates for deletion are referenced directly, as a sanity check.