Woocommerce media items are considered as "unattached"

[omadawnx]

Since woocommerce is a major and a widely used plugin, it should be possible to managed media items related to "products" as they are treated for "posts".
I was trying to clean up my media folder, after importing products twice with their images (my mistake) - the products are easy to delete but their media items remain, taking up server storage.

Using the "unattached" filter in the media panel, it gave me thousands of files, I was glad ("cool, I can actually do this!"), so I started deleting these files.
Turns out, these images are actually related to the products, and WP was not aware of that.

I would be great if WP media panel knew when a media file is related to a product, so they can be easily filtered. I know this is a separate plugin but it is a part of many WP installations.

[joyously]

This is not about the media library or core, but simply about how the post type was entered.

Since you imported the products, you used a plugin, because that is not part of core. The plugin did not properly attach the media to the posts.

[omadawnx]

Thanks @joyously,
I was using the WC API (creating the products with their media items), this should not be different than creating a product manually using the system..

But I think you are right, and adding images manually does attach them to a "product".
I'll close this post..

Replying to joyously:

This is not about the media library or core, but simply about how the post type was entered.

Since you imported the products, you used a plugin, because that is not part of core. The plugin did not properly attach the media to the posts.