User picture not removed when deleting user in Drupal 7

Question

After creating users with a picture programmatically, and deleting them afterwards, I found out that the pictures (files) were not removed.

I started digging into this problem and found out that this problem also occurs when just adding a user by the UI, uploading a picture and deleting the user.

The picture is not being removed. Also the file remains in the file_usage and in the file_managed tables. They're not marked for deletion, so I guess they will stay there forever. Is this a bug? Or am I missing something?

Answer 1

if you really like to delete user profile picture on user delete event use this code in hook_user_delete($account).

// Load user by using user id
$user = user_load($uid);
// Get file id of profile photo
$fid = $user->picture->fid;
// Load the file object
$file = file_load($fid);
// delete profile photo from.
file_delete($file);
// Unset the image object (my case it's 'picture')
unset($user->picture);
// Save the user
user_save($user);

hope works for you

Answer 2

Reference : #3 I'd be interested in opinions on a couple of approaches to this:

1. Modify user.module user_delete function to directly call file_usage_delete and file_delete if there is a profile picture attached to the user account (which would solve this individual issue)

2. As there would appear to be the possibility that any files which belong to the user may not be deleted when the user is deleted via user_delete_multiple, would a better approach be to implement hook_user_delete in the file module (file_user_delete) so that the file module will respond to the user delete by deleting any files associated with them?

As an aside - and might need a separate issue, as far as I can see the code for user_cancel applies the same to "Delete user and all their content" and "Delete user and assign their content to anonymous". Do we need to cover this scenario too?

Hope this help you well.