Why is WordPress creating 16 separate images?

Your theme or plugins may have added additional sizes of derivative images. Plus WordPress creates “Medium Large” in addition to its other three.

Use the plugin “string locator” and look for the text “add_image_size”.

Ok thank you, I’ve installed string locator, but where is it? Nothing appears in the Dashboard sidebar. How do you use it.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Chris.

It’s under TOOLS, I think.

I guess we’re supposed to just magically know that. I found it thank you. Ok with that search I can see that some are created by my theme, but I don’t know where to modify what images it creates.
Overall though I don’t really know how to interpret or act on the results it is showing me.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Chris.

Well, you asked where they’re coming from. There they are. Ask your theme developer whether they’re all necessary and whether you can easily disable any of the sizes.

You could write a quick plugin that uses remove_image_size() to remove some of them.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/remove_image_size

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).

I appreciate the help. Some are coming from the theme, some are coming from Jetpack. I deactivated Jetpack. Here are the search results coming from string locator, if this makes any sense to you.
https://snag.gy/fhNBt3.jpg
https://snag.gy/oQDEOw.jpg

the only ones that matter are in plugin and theme files.

Ok thank you very much