WordPress 4.4 Responsive Images

Thanks. Follow-up question: Is WP Retina 2x needed if you’re using a responsive theme and WordPress 4.4? If so, why?

With the responsive feature of WordPress 4.4, all the image sizes will be simply added to the src-set. Retina will work or not and in all cases if a better resolution of the image is loaded for the retina screen, it might be way too big (or huge). Because of this, I hope they will add an option to disable it. Theme might trick this and add many image sizes (so from 10 image sizes set up by a theme, you will get… 20 !). I don’t think any clean way of doing this.

Of course, WP Retina 2x will do as usual: creates the retina images “in the background”, for each image sizes. In addition, it will add those retina images to the src-set created by WordPress 4.4. That way, depending on the current width/height, for a retina device the perfect image will still be loaded instead of another that might be huge. Dashboard will also work as usual.

Actually, this is really a good news. What WordPress is adding now is what I wanted to add to WordPress, but the retina plugin is not a responsive plugin really and I had to hack into the core. Now it’s done, and I can just add the retina layer.

The big issue for me with this 4.4 is that WordPress becomes only compatible with PictureFill. That was my recommendation anyway, but I know many users only using Retina.js because it works better with sliders or dynamic loaders.

Is the support for WP 4.4 already in 3.5.4 or in a version in development?

Is is in development and it will be released one or two days before the release of WP 4.4.