We are trying to clear up some space on our Kobotoolbox account by removing images. The current process to delete images from a form is very long (see Delete Media Files - #2 by Kal_Lam).
It would be great if there could be a way to simply click one button to delete all the media of a form.
Hi @dianedetoeuf, that’s a great question! We’re actually working on a bulk delete feature to remove many attachments at once which will make this a lot easier going forward. We can share how this will work in practice. The goal though is to make it really easy to remove these attachments – either to free up space or to ensure that respondents’ privacy is protected.
Hi @dianedetoeuf,
Thanks for your question! As Tino mentioned, we have been working on designs for bulk deleting attachments from selected submissions.
For a bulk deletion feature, a user would select the submissions they want to delete attachments from and then click on the ‘Delete attachments only’ text button.
A popup modal will appear to confirm that they want to delete these attachments.
Once deleted, you will see in the table view the attachments that have been deleted.
Alternatively, if you just wanted to delete a single attachment (e.g. an image), you can click the image icon from the table which will show a popup of the image with options to delete or download it.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Hi @tessvuj, thank you, this looks like a great way of bulk deleting media and it will be super useful. Do you know when this feature will be available?
At the moment images are staying in the gallery even after being deleted, so hoping that this will be resolved with the new feature !
Hello, do you know when this feature will be available?
Thank you for the follow-up, @dianedetoeuf! However, we apologize that it’s still uncertain when this feature will be released. We will let you know once we start working on it.
Just to close the loop on this: The issue of images displaying in the gallery after being deleted for a few days has ben resolved a few months ago with release 2.023.37 last October.
Hello, then trying to delete photos from multiple lines at the same time, the EDIT button now appears in a different color and we cannot click on it. Are we not allowed to delete images from multiple submissions at the same time anymore?
@dianedetoeuf Were you able to bulk remove images this way before? The bulk update feature is meant for non-media questions, so I’m not sure this was supposed to work. If it did before, let me know…
@tinok yes we’ve been doing this bulk update on images since september to free up spaces on our accounts. @Kal_Lam explained how to delete one photo in this post, and we’ve followed this by selecting multiple rows at the same time (10 to 30 rows in general). But now we can’t select the edit button of an image field anymore when selecting multiple lines.
@dianedetoeuf Thanks for refreshing my memory on this 
The issue was (as you reported correctly in the other thread you linked to) that using this hack only made it look like the images were deleted. What it removed though was just the file name in the submission, which no longer showed the attachment in the data table or single submission view. It didn’t actually remove the attachment from your storage. That’s why some users noticed that images “deleted” this way would still appear in the gallery. We fixed this issue with a recent release, see Release Notes - version 2.023.48.
At the moment, the only available way for removing attachments is to delete submissions (single, bulk, or by removing the entire project). Once the bulk deletion feature is rolled out it will be possible to remove attachments for multiple submissions without deleting submissions.
Is there a definite timeline for when this update to bulk delete would become available?
@tinok we’ve heard a couple of other OpenFn users asking about this use case as well. Is it possible to remove media/attachments for a single submission via the API?
(Or nope, currently users have to delete the full submission to remove media.)
Thanks for confirming!
Hi @tessvuj
I can’t see the features for “Delete attachments only” in my accounts.
How to find that features?
Thank you in advance
@arif_1234, kindly please be informed that this feature is still a work-in-progress. We will update you once it’s live!
