Reduce Number of Images on Your Server with this WordPress Plugin

When you upload an image to WordPress, you aren’t just storing that one image on your server. In WordPress, a number of different images of various sizes get created automatically. And so instead of one image, you may be storing as many as five images for every one you upload.

This is done to give you a number of different image size options. And while that’s a nice idea, the truth is you probably won’t use most of those images. And so they just sit there on your server, taking up space.

The Dynamic Image Resizer plugin can help with that problem. Instead of generating all those images from the beginning, it creates them only if and when needed.

 

The Plugin in Action

There are no settings to configure with this plugin. Just activate it, and it’s ready to go.

And so in order to see behind the scenes, we’ll take a look at a few uploaded images on the server– first with the plugin activated, and then without the plugin activated.

First I activated the plugin and then uploaded an image. I then checked my server and found that only two images had been created – an original-sized image and what appears to be a thumbnail-sized image (150 x 150).

I’m not sure why it created the thumbnail image as I didn’t think my theme was using any thumbnails, but perhaps it was, and I wasn’t aware of it. In any case, two images wasn’t bad.

 

Next, I deactivated the plugin, made a copy of the image (titled “test-image-Copy”), and then uploaded it in the normal WordPress environment. It created five different images from that one upload.

What the Plugin Won’t Do

A few notes on what the plugin won’t do.

1. It doesn’t work with Multisite.
2. It doesn’t clean up already uploaded images. It only works on images that are uploaded after the plugin is activated.
3. If you change themes, it doesn’t automatically adjust the images to fit new sizes for the new theme. However, as the plugin developer says, “If new sizes are defined by the new theme, and those filenames get generated and requested by that theme, the plugin will generate the new sizes as they are retrieved. So while it can’t correct all cases, it can correct some of them.”

In any case, this plugin can help you take a literal load off your server – especially if you use a lot of images.

Photo: Beautiful Sceneries in Photos on Green Field Background from BigStock

Tags:

• images