Searching & Filtering for Attachments and then deleting them
Asked by C:

I have a page with 100's of attachment

When users are looking to delete an attachment the attachment page , their only options are to sort by name, size and date uploaded.

We can search for the attachment in the general search

We can use Marcos to see lists of attachments

But they all open the attachment and don't seem to have an option of showing it in the attachment page

Is there any better way we can search/filter for an attachment to delete it?


Answers:
author: C
body: Hi , thanks for your response but I dont need bulk deletions

When I need to delete a single document -- I have to click on the 3 dots and choose Attachments from the dropdown. That is the page from where I have the option to delete a document.

But (AND THIS IS THE ISSUE) this page is defaulted to only show 20 attachments at a time. I can sort by Name and size , but I cannot use a filter or a search term to show the document I am after. This means I have to scroll through attachments 20 at a time to get to the one I need to delete. This is very time consuming.

So my question is -- is there a better way to be able to search for a single document and then to be able to delete it?


author: Andy Heinzer
body: Hi,

I understand that you are looking to remove attachments from Confluence server in bulk. There is an existing feature request for this over in <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-17020>

That said, the work-around noted in that ticket really only applies to helping with file version retention. Instead, in your use case, having lots of attachments within a single page creates a difficult means to manage them all. Recently, our team created a new feature request to address this over in <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-82546>

There is also a work-around noted in that ticket:
>
> ### Workaround {#toc-hId-2026400914}
>
> Create a separated page with the [Attachments Macro](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/attachments-macro-97911315.html) adding the search filter by the attachment name.  
> One will need to edit the macro details each time you need to use a different name pattern.

Granted this still is not a bulk delete, but this is means by which you could filter on select attachments to then manage them within the macro. You could then change the filter to some other criteria to remove others. It is not exactly what I think you are looking for, but it might help to use this approach if you need to delete specific attachments from a page like this.

comments: author: C
body: Hi , thanks for your response but I dont need bulk deletions

When I need to delete a single document -- I have to click on the 3 dots and choose Attachments from the dropdown. That is the page from where I have the option to delete a document.

But (AND THIS IS THE ISSUE) this page is defaulted to only show 20 attachments at a time. I can sort by Name and size , but I cannot use a filter or a search term to show the document I am after. This means I have to scroll through attachments 20 at a time to get to the one I need to delete. This is very time consuming.

So my question is -- is there a better way to be able to search for a single document and then to be able to delete it?


author: Andy Heinzer
body: Thank you for clarifying. I still believe that <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-82546> is most appropriate in your use case here. I don't believe that Confluence has a better means to manage a large number of attachments within a single page for the purpose of deleting them.


Tags: attachment

confluence-server

server