WIMDELETE(1)

✨ WIMDELETE — bestie edition 💅

okay so real talk, this is a User Commands page for wimdelete, and it's genuinely one of my faves because it does exactly what it says on the tin and doesn't play games. Let's get into it 🫶

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🌸 NAME 🌸

wimdelete — delete an image from a WIM archive. that's it. that's the whole job. iconic behaviour honestly 💖

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

wimdelete WIMFILE IMAGE [OPTION...]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so wimdelete — which is also literally the same thing as wimlib-imagex delete, they're equivalent besties — deletes the specified image from the Windows Imaging (WIM) archive WIMFILE. bye girl 👋

IMAGE is how you tell it which image in WIMFILE to delete. and you've got options, queen:

• the 1-based index of an image
• the name of an image
• or the keyword "all" — which specifies all images, no crumbs left

and if you're sitting there like "wait which images do I even have", that's what wiminfo(1) is for — use it to list the images contained in WIMFILE. so helpful, so demure 🌈

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🎀 NOTES 🎀

okay this part matters, don't scroll past it.

By default, wimdelete rebuilds the WIM with all unnecessary file data removed. and this is where it's lowkey built different from Microsoft's ImageX and DISM, which only will delete the directory tree metadata and XML data for this operation. so if that's the kind of delete you actually wanted, use --soft. got it? periodt ✨

wimlib allows you to delete all the images from a WIM and have a WIM with 0 images, although such a file may not be very useful. like yeah you can have zero images bestie but what are you even doing at that point 😭

🚨 and here's the one: wimdelete does not support split WIMs. no split WIMs. not happening. don't ask 💀

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --check — Before deleting the image, verify the WIM's integrity if extra integrity information is present. and btw, it also includes extra integrity information in the modified WIM, even if it was not present before. so it's checking and adding the receipts 🧚
• --include-integrity — Include extra integrity information in the modified WIM, i.e. like --check but don't do any verification beforehand. same vibe, less homework ⭐
• --soft — Perform a "soft delete". Specifying this flag overrides the default behavior of rebuilding the entire WIM after deleting an image. Instead, only minimal changes to correctly remove the image from the WIM will be taken. In particular, all file resources will be left alone, even if they are no longer referenced. and, like, this may not be what you want, because no space will be saved by deleting an image in this way 🙈. However, wimoptimize can later be used to rebuild a WIM file that has had images soft-deleted from it. so it's giving "clean it up later" energy 💜
• --unsafe-compact — Compact the WIM archive in-place, eliminating "holes". This is efficient, but in general this option should not be used because a failed or interrupted compaction will corrupt the WIM archive. 😱 For more information, see the documentation for this option to wimoptimize(1). the name has "unsafe" in it for a reason, bestie, read the room 🚩

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🔥 EXAMPLES 🔥

Delete the first image from boot.wim:

wimdelete boot.wim 1

look at her go. so clean. so slay 👑

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

wimlib-imagex(1) wiminfo(1) wimoptimize(1)

go read those too, they're part of the friend group 🫶

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and that's the whole page, bestie — this one came from wimlib 1.14.5, dated January 2026. go delete an image (safely, pls, mind the --unsafe-compact). mwah 💖✨