Problems With Copies of Images Being Automatically Generated in WordPress

I have this problem that I just noticed, but it appears to have been going on for a few years now (you’ll see the screen grabs I have show files back in 2011). And it is happening on most, but not all, of my WordPress sites.

Images are being mysteriously copied into a new upload folder every month and usually within the first week of the month only. The files are my images (.png, .gif, .jpg) simply copied from older posts and placed into the new month folder within the uploads folder. These files are usually named with a generated long string of nonsense.

I cannot figure out why they are being copied, what is copying them (recently did a fresh file upload on a few of the sites and it seems to have triggered images to be copied — so I am thinking whatever the issue is it is either in the database or within the plugins or themes) or how to stop them.

The following 2 screen shots show what is happening. I am seeing files like this:

wp-content/uploads/2015/06/5a99c3482bae9bc04c1436069268e8d3.gif

wp-content/uploads/thumb-cache/5a99c3482bae9bc04c1436069268e8d3-997aeff6453019fefbf7230f9dafeba8-125×125-75-nocrop.gif

When I try to google my issue I get tips and hints on making sure WordPress and Suffusion (the theme I am using) are creating multiple image sizes. I have already turned them off on most of my sites, but as you can see in the image below the multiple images are all named  from my original file name but the added files are random file names.

Like I said I have since turned of Suffusion’s multiple images so now I am only getting three different files sizes when I upload an image. This is not the issue for me. It is the five to twenty copied images being added to the uploads folders every month (and apparently to the thumb-cache folder). I cannot be the only person out there that is getting these (So I Googled: wp-content/uploads/thumb-cache/ & wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ and I’m not alone in this).

So if I am not alone in this, why am I the only one out there trying to stop my hosting service from blowing up with multiple copies or multiple images every month?

Does anybody out there have a solution for this?