Clean Filenames
Removes or replace international or special characters that can make your filenames not compliant with some servers or services.
The facts
- Rating
- 4.6★ from 8
- Active installs
- 3k+
- Price
- Free
- Last updated
- 14 Apr 2025
- Added
- Feb 2011
- Requires WP
- 4.9
- Tested up to
- WP 6.7.7
- Requires PHP
- 5.6
- Downloads
- 29,856
Our analysis
AI-assistedClean Filenames is a WordPress plugin designed to modify filenames during the upload process. It removes or replaces special and international characters to ensure compliance with servers that may not support them, converting filenames to a safer format. This plugin is suitable for users who frequently upload files with non-standard characters and want to avoid potential issues with file compatibility.
The plugin works by applying a series of filters to uploaded filenames, ensuring they contain only letters, numbers, underscores, dashes, and dots, while also converting all letters to lowercase. This functionality helps reduce problems with various servers, services, and plugins that may struggle with special characters in filenames.
Best for: This plugin suits WordPress users who upload files with special or international characters.
What it does well
- ✓Removes or replaces special/international characters
- ✓Replaces '+' with '-' in filenames
- ✓Ensures filenames contain only safe characters
- ✓Converts all letters to lowercase
- ✓Supports a wide range of international characters
Where it falls short
- •Only modifies filenames during the upload process
- •Does not provide features beyond filename sanitisation
Verdict
Clean Filenames offers a straightforward solution for ensuring file compatibility during uploads. It is particularly useful for users dealing with diverse character sets in their filenames.
From the developer
Samuel Aguilera's own description of Clean Filenames, lightly tidied.
Features
It takes the following steps for getting cleaner and safe to use filenames
- Removes or replace special/international characters that can make your filenames not compliant with servers that don’t have support for international locales and filenames, or third-party services. (e.g. ‘España.png’ will become ‘Espana.png’, ‘prüfen’ will become ‘prufen’).
- Replaces any ‘+’ in the filename with ‘-‘ (e.g. ‘A+nice+picture.png’ will become ‘A-nice-picture.png’).
- Replaces any ‘.’ character before the one used for file extension with ‘-‘(e.g. ‘A.nice.picture.png’ will become ‘A-nice-picture.png’).
- After running all character replacement filters, a filter is applied to ensure that the filename only contains letters, numbers, underscores, dashes, and dots. Any other character will be removed from the filename.
- And finally all letters in the filename are set to lowercase to prevent issues with case insensitive systems.
This reduces problems with some servers, services, plugins… That may have problems handling filenames with special or international characters.
The plugin does its job during file upload process, so it’ll change only filenames for files being uploaded after plugin activation.
It supports a large number of international characters, including but not only, characters from belarusian, cyrillic alphabet, czech, german, hebrew, hungarian, russian, polish, spanish, ukrainian, and some other special characters (e.g. №, @, $, etc.).
If you have any questions or need support, please check FAQ for additional information before asking.
Requirements
- WordPress 3.0 or higher