Remove a local image
Medium risk
What do risk levels mean?
- Read-only
- Inspects state without changing anything.
- Low risk
- Reversible with a routine follow-up command.
- Medium risk
- Changes state; undo path documented.
- Destructive
- Deletes or overwrites; confirmation required.
Deletes a specific image from the local Docker host to reclaim disk space. Containers and other images are not touched.
dockerremoveimagedisk
Parameters
Image name and tag (or ID) to remove, such as myapp:old.
Commands
Check whether any container still uses the image before removing it
docker ps --all --filter ancestor=<image>Delete the image tag and its now-unreferenced layers from local storage
docker rmi <image>Verification
docker image ls <image>The image no longer appears in the local image list.
Undo
Re-download the image from its registry
docker pull <image>Pitfalls
- The undo only works for images that exist on a registry; locally built images that were never pushed must be rebuilt.
- Removal fails while a container (even a stopped one) uses the image; remove that container first rather than reaching for --force.
- If the same layers are shared by other tags, only the tag reference is removed and little disk space is freed.