media library now creating 18 versions of every image!

You are also paying for bandwidth and memory usage, which are (generally) more expensive than mere storage.

There is a very good reason why WP does this. These other images are called “thumbnails”. If you have an excerpt of a post on the front page, WP will pull in the thumbnail, rather than the full-size image. Again, this saves on bandwidth and memory, since it is less resource-intensive to serve a small image (generally under 75kb, in my experience) than a large one which has to be shrunk in appearance via CSS or HTML.

If you go to Settings => Media, you can choose the size you want for thumbnails, medium, and large images. (If you select full size when adding an image to a post, it is not affected, of course.)

I’m not sure why you are seeing 18 versions of every image. If you peek into the uploads folder via FTP, you should see four versions of each image. It’s possible that this is the result of a plugin you are using, or that you have changed these settings numerous times. This is not out-of-the-box behavior for WordPress.

just in case anybody from wordpress ever reads these –

Yes, there are people who regularly go through these forums helping people. But your attitude matters, as well.

I have never heard of WordPress creating 18 image versions of a media upload, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. These “extra” images are usually created by your theme or a plugin such as WooCommerce. Usually, people have three or four different sizes they build from the original media upload for thumbnails, small , medium and large files that fit their theme. This is controlled, usually, in the functions.php for your theme. These sizes are created using the add_image_size ( https://developer.www.ads-software.com/reference/functions/add_image_size/ ) function of WordPress.

If your theme is actually creating 18 different media sizes when you do a media upload, I would suggest finding a theme that does not contain that many image sizes.

You can, as mentioned by kjodle above, also add these image sizes using the admin area. There are, I believe, only three defined in the admin section so the additional 15 have to be coming from somewhere, most likely the theme.

If you do change your thumbnail settings, you can always rebuild your thumbnails with this plugin:

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/ajax-thumbnail-rebuild/

It’s an older plugin, sir, but it checks out.

thanks for your tips. got it down to only 5 images and got rid of 8MB