Workshop folder is a mess. Please clean it up.

[Æraños]

I have 962 folders inside my WPE steam workshop folder, which totals up to +30GB.
I just checked one of the large folders and the wallpaper inside it isn't even listed inside WPE.

I checked steam workshop and as I suspected, the wallpaper no longer exist, most probably was removed due to it being against the rules or whatever.

Understandable, that's not the issue. My issue is why am I having this +2GB wallpaper stored inside my workshop folder when it is not even being listed inside WPE.
And how many of those 962 folders are like this.

FTLOG please either allow locally existing wallpaper files inside the workshop folder to be loaded into WPE or please just delete it.

[Tim]

The Workshop folder is entirely handled by Steam. Steam is supposed to clean it up, Steam games and apps are not allowed to touch it and it can break the entire Steam installation.

We actually reported this issue to the Steam development team multiple times, as you correctly noted, Steam sometimes does not seem to clear Workshop subscriptions that have been banned, deleted or made private but it hides them from the subscription list only. However, in other cases it works reliably, so it's probably not a very straight-forward Steam bug as it might seem at first glance. Either way, since we're not the developers of Steam, we have no further influence on this aside from providing as-descriptive-as-possible bug reports to the Steam team.

That said, I personally found a workaround for affected users but it's annoying. You need to visit the Wallpaper Engine Workshop here and make sure you're logged in:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/431960/workshop/

Then, hover over "Your files" and then "Subscribed items". Then use the "Unsubscribe all" button on the right. Obviously this will clear all your subscribed wallpapers, but it will also clear all the broken and deleted subscriptions and Steam will then remove them from your computer. Sometimes a restart of Steam and a reinstallation of Wallpaper Engine is necessary for this to take effect.

If you don't want to lose all your subscriptions, you can first add them to a private collection, for example, and then use the unsubscribe functionality. Afterwards you can just subscribe to your collection and you're back to where you were before:

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=431960&browsesort=trend&section=collections

Hope all of this makes sense but let me know if anything is unclear.

[Æraños]

I can go and do what you suggest but then 6 months from now the problem would just reappear again.
So this would just be a temporary band-aid solution.

You said Workshop folder is entirely handled by Steam, apps are not allowed to touch it, but I can still unsubscribe wallpapers from inside WPE and the files inside my local Workshop folder will be deleted, right? So why can't WPE automatically detects subscriptions which are no longer valid and automatically unsubscribe them for the users, or give the users the option to choose from a generated list?

Basically my question is,
1. Can WPE get a complete list of all Steam Workshop ID under WPE app that a particular user is currently subscribed to?
2. Can WPE extract a list of Steam Workshop ID for subscriptions that are no longer valid? I mean WPE is already only loading up wallpapers that aren't banned, deleted or made private even though these files still exist locally. So I can't see why WPE can't just grab these ID and generate a list.
3. If 1 and 2 both can be done. Why can't WPE cross-check these ID from both list and automatically unsubscribe them or list them out to the users to select which ones they wanna unsubscribe?

[Biohazard]

Wallpaper Engine cannot see what *other* users are subscribed to on the same system. I'm afraid that alone makes your suggestion impossible already.

Wallpaper Engine receives a list of active subscriptions for the currently logged in user and that's it. We can't discern from our end what subscriptions have been unsubscribed, banned or made private by users or which are currently subscribed by other users on the system.

Wallpaper Engine also cannot "modify" item information of items that have been banned, it will receive an "access denied" error. So it couldn't attempt to "unsubscribe" an item that is invisible/blocked anyway.

On top of that, Steam periodically goes haywire due to server downtimes for all users and the information that is sent to Wallpaper Engine is completely unpredictable in such a moment. For example, it may just not return any of the subscriptions, giving Wallpaper Engine the impression that nothing is currently subscribed. If the program would attempt to do something like you suggest then it would completely destroy the Workshop library of every user who starts Wallpaper Engine during such a downtime.

We have looked at this from all angles and I understand why it may seem like a "simple" problem. But there is nothing we can do and no simple fix to fight against this Steam behavior without knowingly causing severe issues for cases like the ones I just explained.

There is no avoiding that Steam needs improving on this end. Valve recently added a Workshop item list to the properties of each game, so perhaps you could see if that helps you. I'm not sure why they added it, but perhaps that new list is able to show removed items.

We have also tested this a couple of times ourselves with dummy items and we never ran into this Steam bug ourselves. It doesn't seem to be a general issue in Steam, it must require some additional conditions. One simple thing that many people forget is that Steam will maintain subscriptions of all users that have been logged in so maybe those downloads come from a different account that was logged in at some point. But this is just a random idea. The only thing I know is that this Steam bug/behavior seems to require a bit more than only the fact that an item was removed. That's possibly why Valve hasn't been able to fix this yet because this condition is so elusive and they need to know the cause in order to fix it.

[Æraños]

Thank you for the answer.