Cleanup Your Preview Folder

Preview Folder Cleanup

After a time, your preview folder will become full of old junk that is not relevant to the current project. This will consist of old html pages and rendered images that you no longer use. Over time they can run to many megabytes.

You should regularly look at the images in your preview folder, to make sure that you are using the best format, and that there are no unnecessary duplicates.

Having no junk in that folder makes life easier, and is more efficient from a housekeeping point of view.

You can safely delete the whole contents of the preview folder. Whenever you do a preview all (double arrows), SiteSpinner rebuilds all files used by your current project.

As always, there are exceptions. There may be occasions when you do not want a full delete. If you have manually placed images or other items in the preview folder, you may not want to delete those. If you are working on multiple projects, you may want to keep the previous project's files in your preview folder. The usual reason for doing this is so that links will work in preview.

To clean up your preview folder, you can use Windows Explorer to manually delete unwanted files. A more automated way is to:

Download this file: Cleanup.bat.
Place it on your desktop, or somewhere convenient.
Double click it whenever you need to delete the contents of your preview folder.

The file is set to handle default SiteSpinner installations on the C: drive. If your install is non-standard, you may need to edit the file to suit the location of your preview folder. Just change the line that starts 'Set PreviewFolder='.

The file deletes all html files, and the whole contents of the geometry folder.

Following is the text from that file. If you have any difficulty downloading Cleanup.bat, (virus checkers may want to block it), paste this text into a file of the same name: