Removing Images from Site ASAP

LiveWhale
1

Hello,

Long story short, we received a (legit) copyright email for an image from 10 years ago. My main goal is to get the image off our website ASAP as others work to figure out licensing and legal.

I deleted the three instances of the image from the CMS, but each is now sitting in the trash. I found a reference for deleted images being kept for up to a year, depending on settings. I can’t let them sit there that long.

I was hoping the trash would have a “delete now” option, but there’s only an option to restore.

Options for items in trash: Restore.

I also tried to delete the image files via FTP, finding the instances and derivatives in /livewhale/content/images/gid/. Attempting to delete the image files result in an attempt to rename a .LCK file resulting in this error.

An FTP error occurred - cannot delete remote file iid_name.jpg.  Out of memory

I assume “LCK” is “lock” and some system is in place to prevent me from doing this accidentally, which is great…in any other circumstance.

Thus, my questions:

  1. Is there a way I can force the complete deletion of specific items in the trash?
  2. Else, are there other ways to achieve this result (set trash retention to 1d, support intervention, etc)?
2

Hi Nick,

Thanks for writing. We’re aware this is a privacy/copyright need but it’s come up so infrequently we haven’t invested in specific UI for it. Also, files in /livewhale/content like image uploads are apache-owned in the file permissions structure, so you wouldn’t be able to manually delete them using your SFTP/SSH user. Instead, we can manually help with one-off cases as your web host.

If you use the Request Help Form or write to your personalized support email address and let us know the individual items you need perma-deleted (right-clicking on the trash can webpage and using the inspector to find the ID listed there would probably be most efficient), we can go ahead and remove those from the server and the trashcan for you.

Let me know if I can say more about this. Thanks!