Oh well, that’s annoying. I very much would prefer to not have to resort to plugins for things like this, but I guess we’ll have to keep carrying on.
So basically the advantage of ours is that it fully taps into the WordPress file uploading mechanism, blankly resizing all image uploads no matter where they come from – i.e. in a post editor, in the media library, or some other plugin like Advanced Custom Fields.
Because of this, the plugin taps into fairly core WordPress API functions and so it is quite robust in that it should *fingers-crossed* work in all future versions of WordPress (albeit if they perform some massive overhaul to the uploading functionality API but that would break a LOT of plugins).
And finally, our resizing takes place on the server as opposed to in the browser like “Resize Image Before Upload” does. This means that the server admin is in control of the available resizing functionality and so they don’t need to worry that their blog authors have capable browsers. I note from the ‘before’ plugin FAQs that it requires Flash to do the resizing which is not present on iPhones/iPads, isn’t installed by default on Macs, and can prove troublesome for a lot of people.
One major disadvantage of ours is that it does require all the image’s data to be sent to the server – so if you have a 30MB image, you will be transfering 30MB; an advantage that the ‘Before’ plugin has over ours. However bandwidth these days isn’t such a huge issue, unlike server storage space which our plugin tries to resolve.
The Imsanity plugin seems to do what ours does and more so we can’t really compete with that one – no point re-inventing the wheel so to speak. Our one was developed through a need to provide standard downscaling of uploaded images on client websites, no fancy options originally. And nothing decent was available that didn’t contain bugs. I do like their convert BMP to JPG though so may actually implement that one to save our customers from having to switch plugins if they like that feature. If we do that, the only difference is their bulk resize option which resizes existing images too.
By the way, I found your image_resize() function and indeed, it’s been depracated as of WP 3.5. However, I don’t think it was used in the backend like our plugin, just it was available to use as a core function. We’ve implemented our own resize functions and so aren’t affected by its removal.
Hope that’s enough info for you.
Kind regards
Phil
