sorl-thumbnail not deleting parent file or cache when entry is deleted

Question

I'm not sure what I am doing wrong. But the uploaded file and it's related cache don't get deleted when the entry is deleted.

I have a photos model inline of a property model, with an FK from the photos model to the property model. I am using 'from sorl.thumbnail import ImageField' to replace the default Django models.ImageField.

In Django Admin, when I delete the entry of a photo, the entry is deleted but the files for that entry are not deleted. I am using Django's runserver for the development and I am not seeing any errors. From what I have read, these files should be removed if the entry is deleted, unless there is a reference to them yet. The only reference that I am seeing yet is in the thumbnail_kvstore table.

Anyone have any thoughts on what I am missing?

Answer 1

The ImageField from sorl.thumbnail should be an extension of django's FileField

From the release notes of django 1.2.5:

In earlier Django versions, when a model instance containing a FileField was deleted, FileField took it upon itself to also delete the file from the backend storage. This opened the door to several potentially serious data-loss scenarios, including rolled-back transactions and fields on different models referencing the same file. In Django 1.2.5, FileField will never delete files from the backend storage. If you need cleanup of orphaned files, you'll need to handle it yourself (for instance, with a custom management command that can be run manually or scheduled to run periodically via e.g. cron).

Answer 2

I had the problem with django-filebrowser, and when you replaced the image with a new one, the cached files did not update. So in my case it wasn't an issue with sorl-thumbnail but rather with django-filebrowser. sorl would only re-draw the thumbnails when the path of the file changed. To fix this I set the filebrowser FILEBROWSER_OVERWRITE_EXISTING setting to False.

FILEBROWSER_OVERWRITE_EXISTING = False

This may help someone at least debug the issue if they are not using django-filebrowser. But in the case of django-filebrowser this is the way to go. Cheers.

Answer 3

The delete_file method will only be called in Django < v1.2.5. The best way to delete sorl.thumbnail.ImageField files, thumbnails and key value store references (used by sorl thumbnail) is to use sorl.thumbnail.delete function: sorl.thumbnail.delete(self.photo)