First off I can’t see any blurriness that you are mentioning when I check out your website. I do, however, notice that the file sizes of the images on the homepage are rather “low” for 150dpi images. The very first image on your homepage of the woman in the lavender fields is registering at 118.46 KB.
The problem here, though, has nothing to do with WordPress… you are pulling these images directly from photobucket.com and WordPress does not compress images pulled from another site. It ONLY compresses images when they are uploaded into the media library. However, you are using two plugins mentioned… retina and image quality plugin… and I know nothing of how these work internally. So while testing other repository sites, disable those plugins.
And though I’m not sure which image quality plugin you are using, the ones I’ve seen only change the quality of compression for those images being uploaded via the media library… so that plugin really isn’t doing anything for you anyway.
I did a quick search on photobucket.com and there are a lot of complaints from people who have lost a lot of work because photobucket.com compressed their images even when they said they wouldn’t. You might want to try a few different image repository sites first and see if that fixes your issue.
Hi there,
Thanks so much for your reply.
I appreciate that the images may not look that blurry – but as I use professional gear to shoot and edit my images, I do feel there is a noticeable difference in quality between the original file and published images.
As you mentioned, Photobucket claim they do not compress photos, so I’m kind of at a stalemate. The images I upload are pretty big – 1200 x 1800 at 150dpi – but obviously somewhere along the way they are being compressed quite a lot.
I will do my best to get a solution from photobucket. Thanks for your help.
And if anyone else has any suggestions to improve quality, it would be much appreciated.
The image I was talking about is only registering at 682px x 1024px. How are you going about pulling the images into WordPress? Are you using the “Get Media Links” option in PhotoBucket and pulling the “Direct Link”? In WordPress, are you adding the picture to the page using the “Insert from URL”?
I do pretty much as you have suggested..
In Photobucket I select ‘links to share this photo’ and then choose ‘direct’.
In WordPress I use the media editor, and insert from URL.
I see what you mean about the file size registering at 682×1024. However, when I right-click save that same photo in Photobucket it comes out super crisp at 1200×1800. Obviously it’s compressing somewhere along the line, I just can’t figure out where and how!
Very interesting… can you give a list of all the plugins you are using?
Of course, there’s a few, sorry to list so many!
Akismet
AVH Extended Categories Widgets
Blogger Importer
Category Posts in Custom Menu
Category Show
Flexo Archives
Google Analyticator
Google XML Sitemaps
HTML Javascript Adder
Internal Link Manager
Link Manager
Most Popular Tags
Online Backup for WordPress
Page Links To
Simple Image Widget
Simple WP Retina
WordPress Menu Sorting
Skimlinks
WordPress Menu Sorting
WordPress SEO
WP Resized Image Quality
WP Retina 2x
Okay, what will that do to my site?
Then I assume active them again one by one? Will deactivating plugins have an effect on already published (and thus compressed) images?
Nice esmi 🙂
On a side note, the following can be deleted:
Simple WP Retina
WP Resized Image Quality
WP Retina 2x
Since you are not using WordPress to host these images. These plugins appear to only affect images uploaded through the media library. You are linking to external images, so they do nothing for you. If you decide to move the images from photobucket.com to WordPress, then you should hold on to them.
what will that do to my site?
Nothing permanently. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet in these situations. So it is necessary to go through a process of elimination designed to locate the root cause as quickly as possible by first removing the most obvious and common culprits via a series of (often) temporary steps.
At first glance, I doubt that the Akismet or Link Manager plugins will be having any effect but I could not vouch for any of the others. So the best approach is to switch them all off and see if that removes the issue.
On a side note about the Retina plugins – do you know if WordPress Retina supported? I feel as though my issues about image quality have been amplified since purchasing a Retina Mac (I use CS6 Photoshop with Retina for editing).
I agree – very difficult to find the root cause. Will deactivate all now.
Yes – WordPress supports Retina.
Okay, thanks.
Not sure how relevant this is – but when I go back to earlier posts when I didn’t edit or upload using Retina – the images are about 600kb and sized at 600×900 (as they should be). So it seems the problem is somehow Retina related. Looks like it may be a Mac problem, as opposed to WordPress.
Thanks so much for your help.
Devices support Retina, not websites or services running websites. Retina only means that the device you are using has a certain DPI ratio that can show a ridiculous amount of pixels in a very small space.
When you are dealing with Retina, you need to optimize images for Retina and dish those images out to the DEVICE. Using a plugin such as the Retina plugins… those plugins attempt to detect if the viewing device supports Retina, and if so, dish them out a Retina version of the image (or a larger, higher DPI version of the image).
In other words, if you want to support Retina, you must have two version of every image or graphic… one for normal devices and one for Retina enabled devices. Serving up a Retina image for a device that doesn’t support it is not “Responsible” web programming as you are giving over sized images to devices that will never see their true quality and will suffer on performance and possibly cost them a lot of money to download if they have to pay per megabit.
