Can Smush Resize Already Uploaded Large Images?
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Problem: Trying to find out if Smush can help me resize already uploaded large images? Referred here by Smush sales chat rep, who couldn’t answer this question, and told me to start a new topic.
Background: Have a 7 year old WP blog that has many photos uploaded, mostly in the 6 to 7 mb range each. Bluehost shared server hosting. Site works, but according to Google Search Console has “no good URLs” for mobile due to slow page speeds, a situation which may have partially to do with all these large original photos. When WP5.3 came along and automatically resized images on upload to maximum 2560 px H or W, I had trouble uploading images to the media library, so disabled this WP5.3 feature using the Disable Big Image Threshold plugin.
Only recently decided to deactivate the Disable Big Image Threshold plugin. Again tried to upload new images to the media library, and suffered about a 50% failure rate. Contacted Bluehost support. They increased PHP limits, which helped reduce that failure rate substantially. The original 6mb photos (typical 4608 x 3456 px) now upload to the media library downsized to roughly 1mb with max 2560 px H or W. This is a tremendous savings in image size, like 83%!
So, what I want to do, is free up a ton of the of the server space I’m using by using Smush to resize all the photos already uploaded to the Bluehost Server (and already in use on my blog) down to max 2560 px H or W, while discarding the all original 6mb images already uploaded in the process. This would essentially amount to having had WP5.3’s automatic upload resizing feature activated for the the past 7 years, long before WP5.3 was even released. I also want to either simultaneously, or subsequently, Smush (compress) all of these images for further savings.
This is an enormous task! Can’t possibly do it manually running photos through an image optimizer one by one, then reloading them to the media library, deleting the original, adding descriptions and captions, and figuring out where to individually reinsert them into their proper positions in one of 570 posts, etc. Would literally take years. So not happening that way! If Smush can do this with a few clicks, it would be like a miracle!
Attempts Using Smush Free Plugin – According to the free Smush plugin, my blog has nearly 22,000 original images in need of Smushing! When I activate and test run Smush on these already uploaded large images, it only compresses them, and does not automatically resize them to the maximum 2560 px H or W limit. The compression takes the file size down to about 5.7 mb on a 6.0 mb file. Improvement, but only a fraction of what could be accomplished if Smush could also resize the image to max 2560 px H or W in the process.
The Smush plugin promotional propaganda makes it sound like Smush can optimize image size and compress all in few clicks, even for previously uploaded images. Is this true, though, only for images uploaded to the media library after the advent of WP5.3? I’ve tried reading Smush’s documentation for both the free and Pro versions, going through all the settings on the free version, and don’t see a way to make this happen.
The Smush sales chat rep told me to use the plugin’s image size settings, but they are already set by default to max 2560 px H or W. Smushing a few sample previously uploaded images only compressed, and did not downsize the files to these limits. Still 4608 x 3456 px. Furthermore, the description of this feature says to use it to permit the use of larger image files, with no mention of using it for downsizing. Already have larger files! 22,000 of them! That’s the problem!
Back to the problem: Can Smush bulk resize already uploaded large images down to max 2560 px H or W, or only compress them while retaining the same image size? The Smush sales rep had no clue.
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