I am about to upload a large number of images to a Wordpress site.
I'll need to resize and replace them until the size is deemed to be the best one. I plan to make the first upload by FTP and then a plugin like Media From FTP.
Sequential uploads will be also be done by FTP. The problem is that this will not update the original image data in the database (for example the dimensions which will be different).
I've seen the plugin Enable Media Replace regenerating original image information, but only for a specific image while I want to do this in batch. I've seen thumbnail regeneration plugins but I'm uncertain that they update the original image's data so I don't know if there's a way.
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
To answer my own question, here's what I did :
Downloaded my images by FTP
Made my resize operations and re-uploaded my images using FTP
Installed WPR Rebuild Meta Data plugin to rebuild all the modified image meta data
Installed Force Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to regenerate thumbnails.
I give a more thorough description here.
Related
I created a WordPress website on which I have 14 images. I did not resize the image source files, but I installed the Smush plugin to optimize the size of the uploaded images.
However, I need to export my website (public-html directory) and it is totally oversized: 270MB. It is for a school project, and I am asked for a 200MB-max directory only.
When checking the wp-content/uploads directory, I notice that each uploaded image ended up with like 10 duplicates of different sizes. The directory overall size is more that 75MB, which is huge.
Thus I have two questions:
Are all those duplicates necessary or can I delete some of them directly from the wp-content/uploads directory?
In Smush settings, I can see that it is possible to choose which duplicate sizes we want among all those automatically generated by WordPress. If I change these settings, I suppose I'll have to re-upload all my images, right?
The "duplicates" you are talking about are, I presume, the different sizes of each image created by your WP setup.
Alternative sizes can be created by:
Wordpress by default can create 3 alternative sizes: a thumbnail, a medium image and a large image (as well as keeping the full sized image that was uploaded).
Your theme can create other images sizes that it will use.
Plugins can also create other sizes that they need.
You can't just delete the additional images or remove that size from being generated and hope for the best. Well-made themes and plugins will only add other image sizes if it uses that size on your website, so removing those images will result in broken images on your website.
Also, even when you delete them, if the code that creates them is also not removed, they will keep getting created when new images are uploaded.
What you could try:
Don't upload very large images The fact that your folder is so big for just 10 images suggests that the photos you are uploading are very large in the first place.
When Wordpress is creating the alternative sizes, it reduces the pixel size but it doesn't always created a greatly-reduced file size. So if the original images are very large, the alternative sizes are also likely to be larger than needed.
Make sure your optimiser plugin settings are optimal Smush and other optimising plugin might not be reducing the size by much depending on the settings (note that the image itself will also affect this). You might need to change the setting to favour file size over quality. Also make sure it is working on all the alternative image sizes.
Don't keep the original full-sized images. Even if your other sizes are reduced effectively, WP keeps the full-sized image by default after it created the alternative sizes.
If you know your site doesn't use the full-sized image, you don't need to keep them. Some image optimisation plugins will automatically remove the original, others will give you the option to do this.
Try a different optimiser plugin. There are a number of plugins available, some reduce the size of images automatically on upload (like Smush), others reduce the size on upload only (such as Imsanity. The image itself has a big effect on how easy they are to optimise, so try a different plugin in case it is better for your images.
In perfomance analysis I've seen, plugins such as the free version of Smush or EWWW don't give great results - the Smush developers even say "The free version of the plugin doesn’t perform that well.". In comparison, the plugins that use paid subscriptions usualy perform a lot better. Some of these have free versions with limited functionality that could work for you, e.g. reSmush.it (free up to 5MB image size) or ShortPixel Image Optimizer (Free up to 100 images per month)
You can manually delete old sizes if you know they are not being used any longer - for example if a deleted plugin or old theme had added other sizes that were no longer needed. But the fact that they were created again when you added them again shows that they are all being created by active plugins and theme.
You can unset any defined image size if you know it is not being used to prevent them from being created, for example, if you don't use some of the default image sizes created by Wordpress. You can use a plugin to do this, such as Smush or Stop Generating Unnecessary Thumbnails.
Or you can use the code below in your functions.php - it will also work for other sizes added by themes and plugins, if you pass the name that was used in add_image_size. Note that this only affects new images uploaded - you will need to delete any existing ones.
function unset_unused_image_sizes( $sizes ){
unset( $sizes[ 'thumbnail' ]);
unset( $sizes[ 'medium' ]);
unset( $sizes[ 'large' ]);
unset( $sizes[ 'full' ] );
return $sizes;
}
add_filter( 'intermediate_image_sizes_advanced', 'unset_unused_image_sizes' );
Not all the resized images will be used - once the add_image_size is added by a theme or plugin, alternative sizes of all images will be created whether they are used or not. So if you upload photos for use on one specific page only, any sizes created by a gallery plugin for example would not be needed. However you will need to do this on an image-by image basis.
Check for plugin caches. Many gallery plugins will create their own cache of images - depending on the plugin, this might be created in the uploads folder. They do use this cache so you can't remove it permanently, but for the purpose of moving a site you can delete the cache folders before you export your site to reduce the overall size. The plugins should recreate the cache on the new site when you use it (but verify this beforehand to be sure!)
Summary
My guess is that your original images are very large to start with and automatic resizing is not optimising them effectively. My first recommendation is to reduce the size before you upload them - graphics packages are usually much more effective at optimising images than Wordpress and even the plugins. As I say above, the developers of Smush say the "free version of the plugin doesn’t perform that well", so you are better off not relying on it to do the optimisation.
I have an old WordPress site with thousands of images that are not optimized; making the site run very slow. I have plans to optimize all the images and then replace the ones on the site with the new, smaller images. I don't want to upload all the images to the site in addition to having the old ones there. I want to delete the old ones and add the new ones. What is the best way that I can accomplish this without breaking things?
If you have FTP access, you could download all of your images and optimize however you see fit, then re-upload (just keep them the same dimensions & file name and override the old files). Be sure to back up any required full-size images because you're overriding the ones on the server this way and wont get them back.
Or use one of dozens of image optimization plugins so you have no need to replace any images manually. For example:
Smush
Ewww
Imagify
Kraken
CW
TinyPNG
I have a WordPress site that uses the WPRO (WordPress Read Only) plugin to host all media files on Amazon S3. I've changed the thumbnail and image sizes in my custom theme, and uploading new images to the media library uses the new sizes. However, when I try to regenerate all thumbnails using "Regenerate Thumbnails," it doesn't work, often complaining that the original cannot be found.
How can I force the regenerate thumbnails plugin to use the original image on S3 to recreate the thumbnails for existing images?
There is a plugin that claim it can "Force Regenerate Thumbnail" i remember using a year ago and it worked for my case at the time.
https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/force-regenerate-thumbnails/
But has of today i personally never go that route anymore for efficiency reasons since a theme can change a lot and edge cases can appear depending on client/corporate needs. To circumvent any "Regeneration" you could install.
https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/fly-dynamic-image-resizer/
The gist of the plugin would be that you define your sizes but are only generated when someone is calling a specific image, thus allowing you to change theme image sizes at any time without going through a Regeneration Process (which can be very long). Any generated file sizes can be deleted also at any time as long as the original exists.
I ran a Mogrify script on my server and resized about 1000 images. That went fine.
However when I started editing pages in Wordpress I noticed the images all looked very odd. Thumbnails for example weren't sized correctly and looked like they had been resized incorrectly.
I checked some images in the media library and saw that their metadata showed the old resolution, before I had resized it.
Is there any way I can have Wordpress go through and update its media library with the correct image sizes?
Problem is WordPress has its own way of dealing with image sizes. And it's not only the metadata and other database info, the various versions that WP generates has the size suffixed to the file name.
You will probably need to use add_image_size in your theme's functions.php and/or adjust the Media Settings in the administrative panel.
After that, run the plugin Regenerate Thumbnails. And regarding its name, I'll quote the plugin author:
Anything that is not the fullsize image is a thumbnail. Some
thumbnails are just bigger than others. My plugin re-makes all of
them.
PS: please note that WordPress questions are better fit here: http://wordpress.stackexchange.com
for some reasons the images I upload to my Drupal website are downsampled.
For example the image I'm uploading is 857x947
I've checked the following settings:
- the size of the CCK ImageField: 420x840
- the size of image cache used to re-sample the image: 420x840
Image Toolkit: Compression: 100%
I'm using cropping functionality. But I'm not dragging a small area, just almost all the original image is selected.
What am I missing ? Maybe php is compressing the image while uploading it ?
Thanks
Just to be sure that it is not caching try to clear all Drupal caches and your browser cache as well.
Then check if the imagecache preset you're using really isn't containing any scale action, just a crop action. To be sure, again just flush the imagecache preset and check the folder that there is no old, wrong image left.
Then go to your content type -> Manage Fields -> your picture field and check if the maximum resolution in there is set correctly.
I'm not aware of any other steps that downsample an image, if you don't have any other image-related modules installed. You wrote that you checked theses things, but most likely one of those steps is responsible.
By default Drupal resamples uploaded jpgs to 75% of their original quality.
Change it in this configuration page
/admin/settings/image-toolkit
Also I noticed that Image Magick library gives better results than default GD, but depends of the format of the image, etc.
Even if you do not use any imagestyle effect and whatever the setting at /admin/settings/image-toolkit the image will always be altered, see https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/246398/image-derivative-size-different-from-original-even-in-absence-of-any-effect and the related Drupal 7 core issue https://www.drupal.org/node/2914964