Symlink link to media files is deleted after calling of delete method of ImageField if value of it field is None.

[piterimov@…]

If media folder for media files is symlink then after calling of delete method of ImageField model's field this symbolic link has been deleted if value of this field is None (i. e. value of image_field.name is empty).
This was found for django 1.3.1 (but maybe and is for others). This is happening for ImageField only. FileField works good.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Here's what I understand from your report (I see you aren't a native speaker):

• settings.MEDIA_ROOT is a symlink — for instance, /var/www/media -> /mnt/storage/media
• you save a model that has an ImageField, without providing any value — instance = MyModel.objects.get(pk=1); instance.my_image = None; instance.save()
• the symlink gets deleted

I tried that, and I can't reproduce the problem. To be honest, it sounds extremely unlikely that Django would delete a directory or a symlink like that.

[anonymous]

It's happening when I try to delete image by image.delete() method.

It's better to show by an example.
Suppose for example we have some model:

class Image(models.Model):
    image = models.ImageField()
    class Meta:
        app_label = 'image'

Then we try to do following:

image = Image()
image.image.delete()

Thereafter symlink to media files will be deleted.

Also I was mistaken about the FileField : This is happening for it too.

Apparently this is happening because the name of image field image.image.name is a blank string '' .
Therefore FileSystemStorage.delete method gets path to media symlink and deletes it.

[apiterimov]

This is a patch which helped me to solve the problem.

[Tim Graham]

It looks like ea3fe78a9d742904f6902cdc353a11d795418105 will prevent this.