WordPress Image "Scaled" to Larger? How to prevent backwards image processing in WordPress
In this quick tutorial, I show how WordPress can scale your image UP instead of down, when it applies the image resizing function during upload, to large images.
In WordPress 5.3, an image size limit was introduced, called the "Big Image Threshold" which causes images larger than 2560 pixels on the long side are automatically scaled to 2560. That's OK for 5 MB, 5000-pixel images straight from the camera.
However, it causes a big problem if you already have a compressed and resized image that you want to use, and it happens to be larger than 2560 pixels. WordPress will scale the image down to 2560, but it's possible that process will make your file size LARGER, not smaller.
In my website https://umph20.com, I noticed a 370 KB image, which is large for me - I like to keep all images under 200KB for the most part. Digging further, I found that WordPress scaled my image, which was 2676 pixels across and 180KB, to 2560 pixels and 370KB!
The automated scaling made my image almost twice as large in file size. Not good!
So, if you're aware of this you can prevent it, and I also show a great free tool from Google, called Squoosh, for resizing and compressing images.
https://squoosh.app/
Thanks for watching!
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I make tutorials like this on request for members, and generally act very helpful in the group.
I'd love to have you!
Gregg