Downscaling Images On Upload in WordPress

Last updated February 17th, 2016 at 06:16 am

Everybody has at least one friend or relative who e-mails pictures so large you can only see a tiny portion without scrolling your e-mail window like crazy in all directions. (Or maybe you’re that friend or relative..)

Yep, Uncle Ernie just got himself a new mega-mega-pixel digital camera, and he skipped the part in the manual (if he even knows where the manual is) about how to create smaller, e-mailable versions of the original images.

And now Uncle Ernie is blogging! And he’s uploading huge images to his blog.

And even though Ernie has mastered the art of embedding just thumbnails of the original images in his blog posts, the trouble is that when visitors to his blog click on those thumbnails, the enlarged (original) images stretch beyond their monitors into the next room.

Unfortunately, native WordPress — even in its most recent incarnation — doesn’t offer particularly robust media-processing tools to protect Uncle Ernie (and his blog visitors) from himself.

The Media section of the Settings subpanel in the WordPress admin dashboard does permit one to specify maximum dimensions (width and height) for the three default image sizes (Thumbnail, Medium, and Large). But there are no settings in native WordPress with respect to the dimensions of uploaded images.

And try as I might, I have been quite unsuccessful in getting clients like Uncle Ernie to use software tools (like the amazing and FREE Irfanview) to resize images before uploading them to their blogs.

Plugin: Resize at Upload Plus

Fortunately, there are plugins to address this problem, and I’m trying one out today: Resize At Upload Plus. (Hat tip to Lonny Salberg, fellow LinkedIn WordPress group member.)

If, when you click on the image in this post, it enlarges to no more than 800 pixels wide and no more than 600 pixels tall, the plugin is working. (The original image is 2000w X 1333h.)

And if the plugin works, nSiteful will be adding it to clients’ WordPress installations.

UPDATE at Feb 17, 2016

The Resize at Upload Plus plugin worked fine for me and for many clients — until a recent WordPress update. Because of deprecated PHP code in the plugin, its settings cannot be changed in WordPress 4.4 (and maybe 4.x; I need to test).

I have found (and now use) a new plugin that works in WordPress 4.4: Resize Image After Upload.

Comments are welcome; stay tuned for updates.