Storage cleanup best practices

Sometimes you may find yourself approaching your Storage plan limits.
In such circumstances, you can choose to either upgrade to a plan which better suits your requirements or free up some storage space in your account.

Below are some tips on how you can more optimally manage your account storage, in order to keep it within plan limits and, in some cases, avoid unnecessary upgrades.

1. Store reasonably sized images: Don't waste storage space on unnecessarily large original images. Cloudinary allows you to apply an incoming transformation to limit the size of the stored resources when uploading your content so that you don't have to pre-generate any scaled-down images before uploading.
   For already uploaded resources, you can re-upload the file with a reduced storage size, for example by using the limit crop method.
2. Store optimal image formats: Use "low weight" formats such as JPG or FLIF/WEBP when images contain transparency rather than "heavy" PNG files etc.
3. Clearing old images or transformations: You can delete original or derived images older than a predefined period of time from your account dashboard using the Bulk Delete feature. Alternatively, you can write a short script that uses the Admin API for deleting the resources. 
   Applying this process every once in a while will make sure you're not wasting your storage on old and unused/unwatched content.
4. Clearing images that haven't been accessed for a while: Using the last_access_report feature, assets that haven't been accessed for a long period can be deleted either using the Bulk Delete feature or the Admin API when deleting the resources.
   Since this requires manual setup on our end, it's currently only available for paid plans.
5. Fetch expiry policy: If fetching is a common use-case on your account then we can set up an expiry policy for your fetched content. With a Fetch Expiry Policy, every fetched resource will have a life cycle after which it's either refreshed or removed from your account (the interval and the action can be determined by you).
   Since this requires manual setup on our end, it's currently only available for paid plans.
6. Refresh Backup: Clear old backup (old revisions and removed content) and initiate a new one to free up some unnecessarily used space. This is irrelevant when the backup is managed on a private S3 bucket.
7. Avoid duplications: Use Cloudinary's capabilities to determine the identity/similarity of an uploaded image to the existing ones on your account.
   More information is available here.

It's on our roadmap to support more criteria for deleting resources, as well as other helpful mechanisms and automation.