On self-managed instances, deleting an image doesn't free up storage space - it only marks the image
as eligible for deletion. To actually delete images and recover storage space, in case they're
unreferenced, administrators must run [garbage collection](../../../administration/packages/container_registry.md#container-registry-garbage-collection).
On GitLab.com, the latest version of the Container Registry includes an automatic online garbage
collector. For more information, see [this blog post](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/10/25/gitlab-com-container-registry-update/).
This is an instance-wide feature, rolling out gradually to a subset of the user base, so some new image repositories created
from GitLab 14.5 onwards are served by this new version of the Container Registry. In this new
version of the Container Registry, layers that aren't referenced by any image manifest, and image
manifests that have no tags and aren't referenced by another manifest (such as multi-architecture
images), are automatically scheduled for deletion after 24 hours if left unreferenced.
