What I found in my WP Media Library

I use Squoosh to compress images for this blog and elsewhere on the web, but I don’t always resize them. Images from older posts, before I discovered Squoosh, have been lurking uncompressed at the bottom of my Media Library.

I couldn’t bear the thought of going through old posts, deleting the images attached to them, locating and squooshing the originals, re-uploading to WordPress and re-attaching to their posts.

Then I read the advice from Chris, The Story-Reading Ape’s blog (reposted here yesterday) about resizing images within WordPress. I’d never used the old WP Admin version of Media Library (see screenshot below if this sounds like Kling-On to you) so I wasn’t aware resizing was possible.

I spent much of yesterday working my way through my Media Library reducing images to 600 pixels on their long side. This has made no difference at all to my blog posts, but I pass on a word (or two) of warning…

Be aware of what you are resizing.

1. Don’t resize your header photos to 600 pixels (as I, on autopilot, began to do). The theme I use recommends 937 by 300 pixels for header images, but this will differ according to your theme; look for guidelines at the top of your column for customising headers.
2. Look out for images from posts you have reblogged. Check which images appear in your introductory excerpt and you can delete the rest.

I actually resized a large group of someone else’s images from a reblogged post before opening the post to check I hadn’t screwed up the reblog. It then registered that most of these images weren’t on my blog at all. Only one image featured on my introduction to the post.

I contacted WordPress support via their chat facility to ask why I had every image from a reblogged post in my Media Library, when the excerpt on my my own blog only featured one of them. Was this a cunning plan to fill my storage and get me to upgrade sooner?

My support person asked for the details of the post in question, so I gave him two recent image-rich examples. On checking them, he seemed surprised to find that this was indeed the case; nobody had queried it with him before. He thought it would probably do no harm to delete the unused images, but wasn’t about to commit himself.

I’ve deleted them. Everything still loads (please let me know if you find a pic that doesn’t) and it’s much quicker to find an image now I don’t have to wait for files to load as I scroll down my Media Library.

I love this community!

Feel free to share the most useful tip you’ve picked up from someone else’s blog post.