Disable Media Permalink by Hardweb.it

This plug-in disables the generation of the HTML of the media permalink within a page. It does not disable the underlying functionality where, e.g., /wp-content/uploads/2023/07/nonpublic.pdf might become accessible as an automatically generated link in the page at /nonpublic/ (an “attachment post”).

(I’ve already restricted access to wp-content/uploads using mod_rewrite to require a HTTP_REFERER from the same site; this allows me to allow links only when I create them on private pages. Except that there’s no way in the UI to set an attachment post to private, so I want to get rid of them entirely. Perhaps I can do that by mangling image.php in the theme.)

The code itself is very nicely concise and easy to understand and confirm it’s not a security threat, so I’m leaving half stars for that, but at least for me, it’s just a security-through-obscurity solution to the underlying issue of attachment posts for media.

Something caused all the media/ image links on the site to be broken. I noticed the permalinks were not the same as the file links. But, I could find nothing that would let me change the permalinks. With over 500 images I did not want to go through and fix them one by one. Plus, I just hate the new WordPress block editor. It drives me crazy just to add any content at all. So, fixing more than 500 image links was far more than I wanted to do. I managed to fix one but it took several minutes for just that one. I tried various other plugins to do with after migrating a site and… I don’t even remember what else now. I tried at least half a dozen different things and nothing worked. I was about to give up. I tried one more search in plugins for something that would help and I found “Disable Media Permalinks”. I didn’t think it would work. I read the FAQ, not really 100% understanding it. But, I thought I didn’t have much to lose at that point. If it didn’t work I would be no better or worse off, in theory. But… it did work!!! Perfectly, and easily. I only had to install it, then save the settings (without making any changes) to Settings>Media. I checked the media library and the images were back!!! Not just there but in all the posts on the live site too. Thank you so much for this plugin! How wonderful to find such an easy fix for a problem with WordPress. Thank you, again!

Installed and activated yet my media permalinks are still loading

This plugin is perfect. You have just to install it to solve a big problem. Thank you for giving the possibility to disable the media permalinks created by WordPress just with one click!

The simplest and most effective way to get rid of annoying media permalinks and the garbage pages they create. I’m very happy to find this!