Suggestion for a great improvement of the Unity Editor: Delete Not-Used references to scenes.

The idea:
In the project view of the unity editor, right-click on a folder.
In the popup menu, the option appears “delete all items that are not referred to by the current scene”.
If you select it, an “are you sure” dialog appears. Upon yes, all items in that folder and its subfolders that are not referred to by the current scene, are deleted from the project.

Similarly, an additional useful option could be “delete all items that are not referred to by any of the scenes in this project”.

I think this idea, if implemented, improves the workflow of all unity users.
Namely - often, 3d models are imported as packages. For instance, packages with brick materials, fabric
materials, furniture, etc.
From the imported models, materials and textures, you use part in your scenes.

90% of the models, materials and textures are never used at all.
At some point, you’d like to remove these unused items from the project, because:

  1. They take up disk space - making the project slower to load - and costlier to backup.
  2. When you switch platforms, all these resources need to be converted to the new
    (bitmaps, audio etc formats of the new platform)

Currently, trying to find which models, materials and textures are actually in use, and removing
the rest by hand, is an error-prone and time consuming process.

Keeping my fingers crossed that Unity will pick up this idea asap.

1 Like

You can add the suggestion to our feedback section. Feedback.unity3d.com

You could add this feature yourself. Use this with the current scene Unity - Scripting API: AssetDatabase.GetDependencies

I like the delete anything not referenced by any scene instead of a single scene. I don’t think I’ve ever made a project with just a single scene.

Rather than delete though, I’d like to see them moved to some “Unused Assets” folder, where you can then take a look at all your unused items. Some assets may have just been overlooked and actually need to be brought into a scene, etc.