Can I remove all the WP thumbnail versions?

Hey michaelrasmussen,

The copies of different image formats are called “thumbnails”, and they are created by WordPress, our plugin cannot prevent them from being created. However, while it is technically possible to disable them, and it’s easy to do that, I would?not?recommend you doing it, simply to avoid loading huge images in various places of your backend.

For example, the medium or thumbnail size (I don’t remember) is displayed on your Media Library list/grid. That considerably speeds up the loading time: imagine your original images are 3 MB in average, and every time you click on Media Library, 30 images are displayed; without thumbnails, the browser would have to download 90 MB. And the same happens for example with the Featured Image placeholder when editing a blog post. I’m sure there are other places too where this happens.

If you anyway want to disable the thumbnails, you can use a plugin like this one: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/disable-generate-thumbnails/

Have a good one!

Thank you for the detailed reply.

My theme creates something like 10+ thumbnail sizes on top of the default that WP creates – and with a site where we upload new content with lots of images daily this equals a lot of image versions on the server.
If your solution serves all of the various versions, then it sounds like I only need the full version, medium and 150×150 thumbnail. That would for sure save the a lot of space on the server ??

Yup, you are right, that’s a lot of used space.

ShortPixel Adaptive Images technically only requires de original image, and it resizes it on-the-fly. So if you understand the consequences of removing the thumbnails, then feel free to do it!