How to Manage Confluence Attachments at Scale
Confluence storage fills up in a predictable way. Teams upload screenshots, exports and diagrams. Pages get rewritten and images get swapped out, but the old files stay attached. After a year or two, a good share of your attachments may not be used anywhere.
Cleaning that up by hand doesn't scale. This guide shows how to do it systematically with Advanced Attachment Manager for Confluence.
What Advanced Attachment Manager Does
Advanced Attachment Manager is a Confluence Cloud app that puts attachments from across your spaces into one dashboard, so you can find and act on them in bulk.
- Filtering: by usage status (used or unused), file type, uploader, space or page, and upload date
- Sorting: by file size, upload date, file name or usage status
- Bulk actions: delete, download as a ZIP, or export the list to CSV
- Audit logs: a record of deletions, with who, when, what and where
- Access control: admins choose whether the app is Admin Only or available to All Users with page access
It doesn't replace Confluence's own controls. Confluence permissions still apply, and deleted files go to Confluence's trash as usual.
The Core Problem: Unused Attachments
An unused attachment is a file that is still attached to a page but no longer referenced in its content. Common causes:
- A file is attached while drafting but never embedded in the final page
- An image is removed from the page content, but the file stays attached
- A screenshot is replaced by a new upload under a different name, and the old one stays
Confluence lets you see attachments per page and per space (Space settings → Content → Attachments), but it doesn't flag which files are unused, and cleaning up means working through files one at a time.
Step 1: Find Unused Attachments
Open the app from the Confluence Apps menu.
Apply the Usage status → Unused filter. If you want to start small, also filter to one space.
On an instance that hasn't been cleaned before, this list is usually longer than expected. Sort by file size, descending to put the biggest files first. A handful of large videos or exported PDFs often account for a large share of the space.
Orphan detection can miss some unused files in complex spaces. Treat the list as a starting point for review, not an automatic delete list.
Step 2: Narrow Down to What's Safe to Delete
Add filters to get to files that are clearly obsolete:
- File type: images and documents (PDF, DOC, DOCX) are the most common leftovers. Work through one type at a time.
- Upload date: files uploaded more than 12 months ago and unused are strong candidates.
- Uploader: if a former team member uploaded many of the unused files, filtering by uploader gives you a focused list to check.
Select files with the checkboxes (shift-click selects a range, ctrl/cmd-click adds single files), or use Select All on the filtered results and then deselect anything you want to keep.
Step 3: Download Before Deleting When Unsure
For any batch you aren't fully sure about, use Download Selected first. The files download as a ZIP to your machine.
Bulk download is also handy before retiring a space: download its attachments to keep a copy outside Confluence. Use Export to CSV if you want a list of what you are about to remove.
Step 4: Bulk Delete
With the files selected:
- Click Delete Selected
- Confirm the action in the dialog
- Check the results in the audit log
For very large selections, delete in smaller batches. Bulk actions on a very large number of attachments can be slow or fail.
Step 5: Review the Audit Log
Advanced Attachment Manager logs file deletions; other actions, such as downloads, are not recorded. The audit log is on the app's admin configuration page, which only admins can open.
Each entry records:
- Timestamp
- The user who deleted the file
- The action and its result
- File details
- The space and page the file was attached to
New entries can take a few minutes to appear. Refresh the page if a deletion isn't there yet.
Step 6: Know How Recovery Works
Deleting a file in Confluence Cloud doesn't remove it for good straight away. Deleted files go to the space's trash, and space admins can restore them from there. One exception: a specific version of an attachment that has been deleted cannot be restored.
The trash is per space: Space settings → Content → Trash. According to Atlassian, attachments of deleted items remain until the trash is purged. Purge only once you are sure nothing needs to come back. Purging is permanent.
If a deletion turns out to be a mistake, look up the file in the audit log, then ask the space admin to restore it from that space's trash.
Make It a Regular Habit
Attachment cleanup works best as a routine. A quarterly pass suits most teams:
- Filter to unused attachments uploaded more than 90 days ago
- Sort by size and work through the largest first
- Bulk delete the clearly obsolete ones
- Download anything uncertain before deleting it
After a few rounds, the backlog is small and each review is quick.
For more ways to reclaim space, including old attachment versions and inactive spaces, see Confluence Storage Cleanup: 5 Safe Ways to Reclaim Space. The app's documentation covers each feature in detail.
