Support » Fixing WordPress » Replacing Old Uploaded Images with Smaller Files via FTP

  • Resolved sbcmurphy

    (@sbcmurphy)


    Hi all –

    I’m helping a friend with her wordpress site http://www.shreddedsprout.com. For the past 2 years she has been uploading photos that are upwards of 3.8mb, and now the site has nearly slowed to a halt.

    I grabbed the entire uploads folder via FTP to help shrink all the images down and replace them. The problem I’ve run into is that WordPress automatically creates multiple files for each images (example: dog.jpg, dog-150×150.jpg, dog-600×400.jpg, etc.)

    My question is: Can I just replace the large files, or do i need to optimize each of the autogenerated extra files as well?

    Thanks for the help everyone!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Hi sbcmurphy,

    I actually have some experience with a similar situation.

    For everything except the original size images:
    You can use a plugin like AJAX Thumbnail Rebuild to rebuild the various image sizes based on your Settings > Media settings.

    The original images:
    What I did was to segregate out the original images and used an image resizing app to size them to fit inside a 1000px box (or whatever) and overwrote them via FTP.

    Doing this dropped the client’s uploads folder from 3 GB to 1 GB.

    I also wrote a plugin called Enable Image Scaling on Upload which

    • Allows you to scale images to fit specific max-dimensions on upload
    • Keeps your original images a sane size for the web and filesizes much lower
    Thread Starter sbcmurphy

    (@sbcmurphy)

    So I’m wondering…If I just reduce the size of the source files and leave the auto generated thumbnail files as is, do you think it would still work?

    I would just compress the source files in photoshop and keep all file names identical.

    So I’m wondering…If I just reduce the size of the source files and leave the auto generated thumbnail files as is, do you think it would still work?

    Sure. Resizing them down should make a sizable difference in the filesizes.

    Thread Starter sbcmurphy

    (@sbcmurphy)

    Thank you all for the clarification, I appreciate the help!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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