How to clear cached images from sprite renderer

Here is an experiment. It:

• reads all png images from given location as Texture2Ds & converts them to Sprites

• displays them all in sequence as animation frames

• deallocates everything

• repeats

Note the square wave-like memory allocation graph it produced and let it be a proof this allocation/deallocation bussines works just fine.

LetsRick.cs

 using System.Collections;
 using System.Collections.Generic;
 using UnityEngine;
 using IO = System.IO;
 public class LetsRick : MonoBehaviour
 {
     [SerializeField] string _directoryPath = "D:/rick-n-roll/";
     [SerializeField] float _delayBetweenFrames = 0.16f;
     SpriteRenderer _spriteRenderer = null;
     IEnumerator Start ()
     {
         _spriteRenderer = gameObject.AddComponent<SpriteRenderer>();
         
         var wait = new WaitForSeconds( 0.5f );
         string[] files = IO.Directory.GetFiles( _directoryPath );
         if( files.Length!=0 )
         {
             List<Sprite> frames = new List<Sprite>(128);
             while( true )
             {
                 // load all images as sprites, at once:
                 foreach( string filePath in files )
                 {
                     var bytes = IO.File.ReadAllBytes( filePath );
                     Texture2D texture = new Texture2D( 2 , 2 , TextureFormat.RGB24 , 0 , false );
                     if( ImageConversion.LoadImage( texture , bytes , true ) )
                     {
                         Sprite sprite = Sprite.Create( texture , new Rect(0,0,texture.width,texture.height) , new Vector2( 0.5f , 0.5f ) );
                         frames.Add( sprite );
                     }
                     else Debug.LogWarning($"image load failed, path: \"{filePath}\"");
                 }
 
                 // display all images in sequence:
                 var frameDuration = new WaitForSeconds( _delayBetweenFrames );
                 for( int i=0 ; i<frames.Count ; i++ )
                 {
                     _spriteRenderer.sprite = frames[i];
                     yield return frameDuration;
                 }
 
                 // free memory up:
                 for( int i=frames.Count-1 ; i!=-1 ; i-- )
                 {
                     Object.Destroy( frames[i].texture );
                     Object.Destroy( frames[i] );
                 }
                 frames.Clear();
 
                 // a lof of time to check it out in the profiler:
                 yield return wait;
             }
         }
         else Debug.LogWarning($"no files found for path: \"{_directoryPath}\"");
     }
 }