Woocommerce created 75,000+ images

Hi @zimbo000,

Sorry again that you haven’t received a response here yet – this is not something I had personally seen before but I can confirm this behavior when testing locally.

The explanation for what you’re seeing lies with the fact that WooCommerce registers new image sizes with WordPress. These image sizes are used for products in order to render product images and thumbnails properly on Shop pages and product pages.

The quirk with this WordPress function is that there isn’t a way to add a “context” to registering a new image size. Basically, you can just register a new size but you can’t say that it only applies to specific post types(pages, posts, products, etc).

https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/add_image_size/

So, the short answer is that this is indeed expected behavior. Since you intend to utilize WooCommerce again I would make sure that your hosting provider allocates enough space for the regeneration of thumbnails.

If you are proficient with PHP you could remove some of the image size declarations to generate fewer thumbnails, however, you run the risk of not having the images necessary to display product images.

https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/remove_image_size/

Hope that helps!

We don’t want to utilise Woocommerce for its e-commerce function. It’s an add-on that hooks into Woocommerce that gives us the functionality we need.

I see. That seems like overkill to utilize WooCommerce if you don’t need any eCommerce functionality. Before going further, are you sure there aren’t any alternatives to the add-on you need? Perhaps one that doesn’t require WooCommerce as a dependency?

Anyways, you would pretty much do the exact same thing as you mentioned; create a custom function with calls to remove_image_size and pass in the string representing the image sizes added by WooCommerce. You can find them here:

https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/blob/0ffd7f10e950d0d9bec94dab034e44f040a2275d/includes/class-woocommerce.php#L639

• woocommerce_thumbnail
• woocommerce_single
• woocommerce_gallery_thumbnail

Hope that helps!

Just FYI, if I did create another custom function, would the add_action line still use ‘after_setup_theme’ or would another function be required?

WooCommerce adds its image size declarations using the ‘init’ hook with a default priority of 10. Thus, you’d have to hook into either a hook run after ‘init’ or use ‘init’ with a priority higher than 10. You won’t be able to prevent WooCommerce adding custom image sizes if a hook is used before init with 10 as the priority.

The following works and actually removes all image sizes other than the default WordPress sizes:

function remove_extra_image_sizes() {
	write_log('removing extra images');
    foreach ( get_intermediate_image_sizes() as $size ) {
        if ( !in_array( $size, array( 'thumbnail', 'medium', 'medium_large', 'large' ) ) ) {
            remove_image_size( $size );
        }
    }
}
 
add_action('init', 'remove_extra_image_sizes', 20);

Cheers!