if you remove the size, you’ll obviously can’t use the images you generated before.
I’m not talking about removing the images themselves just the SETTINGS for GENERATING those sizes.
Thus not really “obvious” and thus my question.
Just ran a test. Created a new size, added images, which it created.
Added them to pages.
Deleted the size.
Images are still there.
Thus deleting the Size in the plugin, only deletes the instruction to create the size, NOT any images created previously.
Disregard med_freeman’s post.
Hi,
The images are not removed by WordPress in the uploads folder and the plugin only register the right image sizes and allow you to regenerate them
Deleting the previously generated images would be a very helpful additional feature.
Force Regenerate Thumbnails is a fork of Regenerate Thumbnails that adds this feature to it. Unfortunately, both are over a year old and at least the fork has had reported issues with characters outside the English alphabets, and the UI of Simple Image Sizes is awesome, so it’d be excellent if this feature could be added to this plugin.
There are threads in this forum, elsewhere on wordpress.org and on other sites with numerous people asking for how to remove unused thumbnail files, so this would be very helpful to many.
Rahe: Thanks for the great plugin and hopefully you can take this into consideration!
Yeah.. that would be a nice feature. I think maybe another plugin would come along to handle trimming unused images. It’s pretty risky set of things to delete. I probably wouldn’t use something like that until bugs were worked out.
In the meantime, I have been manually deleting images of certain sizes on some of my sites by finding size with the trialing dimensions in them, which is pretty standard.
I’ve got a design in mind how such a feature should work: it would find all the files in the uploaded folder, all files in the postmeta table, and remove those files that are not listed. In effect, it would remove everything that doesn’t have corresponding metadata.
Won’t have the time to implement that now though. Took as shortcut and spent an hour deleting 4 000 files by matching filename patterns. In the end the fastest way was to remove all thumbnail sizes and then regenerate those left.
The removal can be done with filename patterns like *-???x???. in Windows, with combinations of two or four question marks on either side of the x as necessary. Eg. *-????x??. and all other combinations. On top of the manual work involved, this has the downside of deleting those images that were resized by WordPress or similarly renamed before uploaded. If you have logo-960×250.jpg, it will get lost this way, so keep a backup handy to restore any files you notice missing.
