This is unbelievable, magento created 350.000 files today. what's wrong, I'm helpless

[Loginname]

magento 1.9.3.7

I have 180.000 pictures in the \media\import folder

I'm running imports of 180.000 products

I have had to delete all tables and import a database backup of mysql, hence I had to restart the import process again...

My hosting account can hold 700.000 files, Earlier today it was at around 350.000 files, but now when I check it is passed 700.000, and I fear the shop will be shotdown until the hosting company get online in 5 days... In the meanwhile I'm looking for clues to why this happend... Memory usage is 97% without any major work being done (I was just browsing)...

I have looked for cachec files, tmp files but nowhere could I find that many..

Audun

[Tom Robertshaw · Accepted solution]

When you run a product import, magento will look for the image files declared in the spreadsheet and look for them in the media/import/ folder. It will then copy them across into the media/catalog/product/ subfolders. As customers browse your site, magento will then additionally create multiple resized files for each image to show them at the appropriate size as declared in your theme on the category, product, cart pages etc. 

So, the number of images will increase each time you import. Depending on your theme, I would expect there to be around 4 or 5 copies of each product image, each one a different size.  Once imported, you could delete the images in media/import/ as these are no longer need. You'll want to also be careful not to reimport images on each import as, depending on how Magento is configured, it could overwrite images in admin but not delete them from the server. 

[Loginname]

my fault, had been reimporting the products with images, without deleting the existing images