If you have a WordPress blog dating back many, many years, and you’ve just completed a massive cleanup of images from your Media Library, or if you just have any other reason why there might be a bunch of <img> tags in your blog posts that no longer go anywhere, you may be wondering if there’s an easy way to just, you know, have those annoying broken image icons not show up all over your pages.

Now there’s a way!

OK, actually there already were a few different ways, via free plugins, but as is so often the case with a lot of these types of small, single-purpose plugins, I find they’re almost always either really clumsily written, overloaded with unnecessary features, or both.

So I wrote my own.

This plugin couldn’t be simpler. It assumes that you just don’t want to display broken images — whether that’s the ugly little “missing image” icon some browsers display, the large outlined box containing an ugly little icon and the missing image’s “alt” text, or just a big blank white space. It doesn’t have an option for showing a different, placeholder image. Because, let’s be honest, that doesn’t look good… especially if you have more than a few of these to deal with. Having the same placeholder appear all over your site looks as bad as having broken image icons everywhere.

The plugin relies on the JavaScript error event, and uses some very compact jQuery code to remove any <img> tags that trigger the error, and their containing link and caption element, if present.

The end result is a clean looking blog with no indications whatsoever that anything is missing. Unless the text of your blog post describes the image in excruciating detail. In that case… you’ll just have to wait for version 2.

You can download Remove Broken Images right now from the WordPress Plugin Directory.