Check media option is forcing to delete the media on my flashcards

Hello! I have been using Anki for several years on my PC for professional purposes as I am a language teacher. I have created dozens of flashcards for each of my students with video/audio/picture media and I export these decks for them to use.
Recently Anki forced me to use the “Check Media” option which shows me this message with unused or defective flashcards according to him. I can no longer export decks to send to my students

As mentioned these flashcards are not used by me but for my students so can I bypass or disable this check obligation? because I will always have flashcards that I don’t study and that will be displayed as “missing or useless” since they are not studied directly by me

It’s the media files (i.e. images, audio, and video) that are not used, not the cards themselves. Deleting unused files should have no effect on the cards. The unused files are probably leftover from cards you deleted in the past (Anki doesn’t delete unused files or run Check Media automatically). Also note that there is nothing forcing you to delete the files (you can just close the window), but it’s recommended to free space.

I understand the logic but it’s still problematic for me. Even if it’s just about the media I will have to find or recreate the media for the flashcards that have been modified after the audit. Doing this will take me several hours of work whereas having this database, even if it can be substantial in terms of space, is a time saver because I just have to copy and paste an already existing word that may be needed for this other student (without having to recreate the media files)

To test deleting what Anki recognizes as “missing or unused” means that only the text exists but not the media files. And I can no longer export without having to go through “Check Media” because otherwise I get this warning message, “Please use the “check media…” function, and try again.” So I can’t ignore the message because I am well forced by Anki to use the “Check Media” option

Looks like this message appears when there is an encoding problem in some filenames. @dae will have a better idea how to help you fix this in that case. I suspect Check Media is failing to handle some edge case.

Something weird is going on with the media your cards are using. Your cards reference images like <img src="paste-something.">. Note the trailing dot. That’s not a valid filename on Windows; it should end with something like .jpg or .png instead. You can click on <> at the top right of a field to see the filename.

I’d expect when you paste something into Anki, a .jpg or .png extension is added. If that’s not happening, I suspect an add-on you are using is to blame. If it does work with pasting, I suspect you may have accidentally removed the extensions with a find&replace operation.

To get things working again, you’ll need to use find&replace to make the filenames match the media files - eg by replacing ."> with ">. Make sure you make a backup first.

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I think I understand the problem now. I checked the files reported as missing and they are all .gif files that I copied and pasted from the internet. So I think that if I edit these files by adding “.gif”, the problem should be solved.

However, I wonder if the files reported as “unused” can also block the export or only the “missing” files?

If Anki can’t find missing cards during review, it won’t be able to include them in an export either. Unused cards won’t cause problems on their own, but they can be a sign that the filenames in fields and on disk do not match.

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In case people have issue with their flashcards where they have gif image, I resolved my issue with this website https://ezgif.com/maker where I could drop my broken gif in this website, save them on my pc ans so recreate the flashcard with the previous gif but now with a valid filename.

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