How to delete old image when update ImageField?

Question

I\'m using Django to create a stock photo site, I have an ImageField in my model, the problem is that when the user updates the image field, the original image file isn\'t d

Answer 1

You can define pre_save reciever in models:

@receiver(models.signals.pre_save, sender=UserAccount)
def delete_file_on_change_extension(sender, instance, **kwargs):
    if instance.pk:
        try:
            old_avatar = UserAccount.objects.get(pk=instance.pk).avatar
        except UserAccount.DoesNotExist:
            return
        else:
            new_avatar = instance.avatar
            if old_avatar and old_avatar.url != new_avatar.url:
                old_avatar.delete(save=False)

My avatrs has unique url for each person like "avatars/ceb47779-8833-4719-8711-6f4e5cabb2b2.png". If user upload new image with different extension like jpg, delete_file_on_change_extension reciever remove old image, before save new with url "avatars/ceb47779-8833-4719-8711-6f4e5cabb2b2.jpg" (in this case). If user uploads new image with same extension django overwrite old image on storage (disk), because images paths are the same. This works fine with AWS S3 django-storage.