Question about auto-generated image sizes

  • Resolved TeqToo

    (@teqtoo)


    9 years ago

    Wow, I never realized how many different image sizes were generated when uploading an image to a wordpress site!

    One of the clients I have using this theme is a non-profit with a limited budget, currently grandfathered into a very inexpensive hosting package with limited disk quota of 500mb. I created some lightbox galleries for them, and a number of slide shows.

    Recently I’ve gotten notices that they were approaching the limits of their disk quota, and then earlier this week (after doing a site backup which generated a few largish log files) I got a notice that they had exceeded their disk quota. So I’m trying to clean up anything unnecessary on the server.

    I discovered all the image sizes while roaming around on the file manager, and began wondering how many of those are really necessary for use with a responsive theme? There’s at lease five or six image sizes for each image, which I’m sure is eating up a ton of disk space, but I don’t know which ones I can safely delete and still have the site be responsive.

    Since deleting unnecessary image sizes manually would be a formidable task, I have been looking into this plugin, but don’t want to use it to remove images sizes for the existing images if it’s going to “break” the responsive nature of the client’s website.

    Any thoughts, warnings, ideas?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Theme Author Shaped Pixels

    (@shaped-pixels)

    I’m not familiar with that plugin, but all I can recommend is make sure you have a site backup first before anything. Generally all the images that are added in addition to the original will have name extensions added to the file name that usually represents the thumbnail size, for example:

    myphoto-300×150.jpg

    The original image is:

    myphoto.jpg

    Regarding your question about breaking the responsiveness of the website/theme, it won’t as responsive images is done from the stylesheet level.

    Still, always make a backup before venturing into anything unknown.

    Thread Starter TeqToo

    (@teqtoo)

    Thanks, I will certainly make a backup, and with the information from the plugin author on this thread I think I might give it a try after creating a backup.

    Theme Author Shaped Pixels

    (@shaped-pixels)

    I just wanted to follow up to see how things are going with your issue and this topic?

    By the way, I wrote an article about the number of thumbnails generated.

    Thread Starter TeqToo

    (@teqtoo)

    Thanks for checking….Great article! I only wish I’d seen it six months ago! I will certainly keep this in mind when building future websites!

    I finally resolved this particular issue by getting in touch with the web host to find out WHAT was going on with the sudden disk space crisis, since the site only went over the 500mb limit AFTER I’d moved the files out into the root folder. I never did get a really clear answer, but after they did some back-of-house cleaning outside of my root folder, the disk space dropped to a manageable level. So I decided against using that plug-in to clean up the upload directories for fear that many image links would be broken. The website had JUST been launched to the public, and I didn’t want to risk it.

    I should try it out on another site, one that doesn’t have so many photos to worry about. The other issue I have is downloading backups – my swine satellite internet plan has a limited data allowance, so unless I want to make backups between 2AM and 8AM, I end up digging deeply into my data allowance just to make a backup.

    Thread Starter TeqToo

    (@teqtoo)

    Also, on that website I was using that third party plugin to create the lightbox galleries, and I didn’t know what using that plugin might do to the galleries I’d created with it…and there were a ton of them!

    Theme Author Shaped Pixels

    (@shaped-pixels)

    No worries. As for backing up…look at backup services like VaultPress, which might be the solution without downloading the backup.

    I wasn’t sure if this topic should be set as resolved or if you need anything else with this one?

    Thread Starter TeqToo

    (@teqtoo)

    I’m all set as far as needing help…if I experiment with the plugin I can let you know the results, but for now I think we can call it resolved.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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