gshaupert

Sorry for the delay but here’s a summary of what worked for me to solve this immediate problem, plus customize the functionality of my site more to my liking. I realize my preferences are pretty specific but maybe this summary will help others on the path towards a solution if not provide an immediate fix. Thanks to deepbevel for assistance and inspiration on my quest…

#1 Created a child theme for Twenty Eleven with a functions.php file that prevents generation of the default WordPress image sizes “medium” and “large”, and the Twenty Eleven custom image sizes “post-thumbnail”, “large-feature” and “small-feature”. Information from https://www.studiograsshopper.ch helped me figure out how to do this.

#2 Temporarily switched to a theme that didn’t use any custom image sizes, for me specifically Toolbox by Automattic.

#3 Used the “Additional image sizes (zui)” plugin to delete unwanted image sizes. In some cases, this seemed to just delete the reference to the image size in the database where I’d physically deleted the corresponding image from my server via FTP.

#4 Switch to my custom child theme.

For now, none of my site’s images use the “medium” size as the display image for the “Edit Image” page and I’m not getting blank areas or error messages when using “Edit Image”. I’ve not gone through all 950+ images but in a random sampling everything works. Also, the custom child theme prevents the creation of the sizes I don’t want.

I’m using the “Imsanity” plugin to limit image dimensions to 640 pixels, so I end up with two versions of each uploaded image – a 150 pixel maximum dimension thumbnail and the original image resized to a maximum of 640 pixels. Just how I want it!

Thank you for getting me starting down another path that may lead to a solution! So far I’ve not figured out what exactly is happening BUT I have found that TwentyEleven seems to be part of the problem. Photos uploaded when it is the active theme display this problem but photos uploaded with other themes (tested with TwentyTen and Toolbox) do not. So there is something within that theme that makes the 300×400 featured image the “default” when dealing with the Edit Image page.

Still grovelling through stuff but getting closer. I really need to sit down and learn how to write my own theme…