dare.co.uk · wp-content/uploads inventory · 2026-05-14

Inventory ahead of the Flywheel wp-content/uploads/ → images.dare.co.uk migration. Generated post-decoupling of the last 5 twentytwenty-themed pages (commits 25003ce0 + 1f6802a1).

Topline

What this tells us: the “1.4 GB Flywheel tether” is 99.7% orphan. The actual mirror workload is twenty files, ~half a megabyte of payload.

Tier 1 — Active <img src> references (3 files)

Visible breakage if removed. Must mirror + rewrite.

Naming follows feedback_seo_image_naming_convention.md: subject-first, drop dimension suffixes (-300x192), drop edge/ legacy directory.

Tier 2 — Sitemap-only <image:image> entries (17 on disk + 11 broken)

Search-engine signals for image search. Stripping them costs image-search visibility on legacy posts; replacing with images.dare.co.uk URLs preserves it.

On disk, mirrorable (17):

bck-wte.jpg                                     RichardBransonMindMap.jpg
black-heels-red-bottoms.jpg                     riverside.jpg
canva-wipe-out-2.jpg                            rosie_huntington-whiteley_naked_butt.jpeg
cheeming_boey_01.jpg                            sas-communicator-omega-seamaster-caseback-1024px-1-1.jpg
cheeming_boey_02.jpg                            sas-communicator-omega-seamaster-caseback-1024px-2.jpg
cheeming_boey_04-1.jpg
cheeming_boey_05-1.jpg
cheeming_boey_06-1.jpg
Designer-As.jpg
lake_people_to_scale.jpg
n2.jpg
Pride_and_Prejudice_004_7271339306.jpg

Already missing on disk, sitemap-stale (11):

better-together.jpeg                            n1.jpg
british-airways-concorde-room-15-scaled.jpg     n3.jpg
british-airways-concorde-room-jfk-2926.jpg      pembreysands-c130-550px.jpg
keira-closeup.jpg                               preview-of-google-tv-now-available-on-android-sdk_1.jpg
lake_drain_big.jpg
lake_plug.jpg
monticello_dam_glory_hole.jpg

These should be removed from post-sitemap.xml outright — the sitemap is currently lying to Google about images that 404.

Notable: pembreysands-c130-550px.jpg is the Swedish-C130 image the editorial cited today. Worth a closer look — the image may exist on images.dare.co.uk already, just under a different slug, and only the sitemap is stale.

Tier 3 — Pure orphans (~7,564 files, ~1.4 GB)

Image files in wp-content/uploads/ that no live HTML or sitemap references. Pure deploy-bundle bloat from the WP export.

Subcategories: - wp-content/uploads/al_opt_content/ — old WP image-optimisation plugin caches (*_al_style.css + transformed image variants) - wp-content/uploads/edge/ — Edge magazine thumbnails (3 of these are Tier 1; the rest orphan) - Year/month directories (2018/03/, 2019/11/, etc.) — WP’s default upload tree

Recommendation: after Tier 1+2 are mirrored, .assetsignore should add:

wp-content/uploads/*
wp-content/plugins/*
wp-includes/*
wp-content/themes/*

This drops deploy bundle ~1.5 GB → near-zero.

Watch items

• Post-sitemap.xml regenerate: the sitemap is a 2026-05-07 snapshot of WP-era state. Once HTML refs are rewritten, post-sitemap.xml should also be regenerated from the static repo to align <loc> URLs + <image:image> URLs with the current images.dare.co.uk-hosted images.
• Featured-card image overlap: three of the Tier 2 images (cheeming_boey_*.jpg) might be candidates for featured-strip resurrection — those are interview photographs with editorial value. Flag for the featured-card picker after mirror.
• NSFW filename: rosie_huntington-whiteley_naked_butt.jpeg — flag this for review. Either the image is mis-titled (likely a legacy spam-injection slug), or the post itself warrants reassessment. Either way, “naked-butt” in a CDN URL is not the SEO posture you want.
• GSC image search delta: worth a +30-day GSC sweep on images.dare.co.uk post-rewrite to verify image-search signals carried over.

Recommendations

1. Rename + mirror Tier 1 (3 images) to images.dare.co.uk using the SEO-friendly slug convention. Update the 3 referencing HTML pages.
2. Mirror Tier 2 on-disk (17 images) — defer slug renaming to per-image judgement (some need article context); use a simple slug-prefix for the obvious ones, keep the cheeming_boey numbered series intact (it’s a sequence).
3. Strip the 11 stale sitemap entries from post-sitemap.xml for 404’d images.
4. .assetsignore add wp-* trees — once nothing live references them, the 1.4 GB → 0 transition is one commit.
5. Regenerate post-sitemap.xml from the migrated static tree, so all <image:image> URLs point at the canonical images.dare.co.uk cohort.

Inventory before action. The Flywheel tether is a 0.3% problem dressed up as a 1.4 GB one.