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We’ve had a raft of challenging questions sent in by our readers, and some outstanding responses from helpful folk in the WPMU community. We’ll be doing a wrap up article on Monday where we cover all of the questions and a selection of the best answers – stay tuned!
Today’s WordPress Question
This one comes to us from a WPMU reader named Khris, who operates the website DIY Bride.
How do I tame my media library? Whenever an image is added to a post, multiple thumbnail sizes of the image are generated by WordPress. Since I don’t use most of those sizes with my theme, there are quite literally thousands of orphaned images taking up space on my server. (It’s an image-heavy site.)
I’m running 3.2.1 and want to upgrade to 3.3 without import timeouts or failed memory fatal errors. I’ve seen a plugin called DUI mentioned in many posts; it doesn’t work with 3.2.1 (at least my install) and I’ve not yet found another other way to do this, beyond manually deleting the files.
Does anyone know a way to automatically get rid of these multiple image sizes, or stop WordPress from creating them in the first place?
-Khris
Let’s get some solutions!
If you can offer Khris any insight on this WordPress dilemma, please leave a comment below this article and tell us what you think. We want to see the smartest ideas that you WordPress folk can muster, and we’ll be publishing the best answers here on the blog next week. Show us your skills!
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If you change the default image sizes you want deleted to “0″, they should not load. By setting the creation size to “0″, WordPress will stop creating them, and only the image you loaded is saved.
Dashboard > Settings > Media > set dimensions to “0″.
Outstanding answer Marna! Thanks :)
As I’m manually cleaning out my uploads folders, I’m finding there are sometimes up to 34 different sizes of a single image! I’ve deleted over 7,000 unused images already with many thousands to go.
Finding a way to prevent the multiple thumbnail creation is fabulous. Thank you, Marna, for the tip.
There is a plugin called ‘delete unused images’ that can be used to clean up your media library:
http://www.bobhobby.com/2008/02/24/delete-unused-image-files-plugin-for-wordpress/
I would definitely make sure to back up the media library prior to running the plugin, but i’ve used it successfully on a couple of sites.