Please a solution to just generate thumbs for featured image

Hello, I have 17k plus posts and growing every day, my images/thumbs count until now is of more than 500,000 images (half a million). Please we need a solution, there must be a way to just generate thumbs from featured image. This problem makes the theme unusable for many of us. I realy can’t understand why an “error” like this is being overlooked. Many of us will greatly appreciate any help on this matter.

Thank you!

Hello, thanks for your fast response.

If I disable all thumb sizes from the theme and then regenerate, are all the thumbs that were created be deleted leaving only the original images that were uploaded? And if this is possible, which image regenerate plugin would you recommend me for this matter?

It would be more effective for my case if I localy create from each image that I’m using as featured the four or five sizes that the theme requires and add them manualy to each post’s folder after cleaning all those thumbnails that were automatically created.

The most important part is to automatically delete all the thumbs that were created, leaving only the original images that werer uploaded by me.

Thank you!

Don’t know how to automatically delete old thumbnails; I was actually looking at best way to do this myself recently.

One thing you can try, is have your host make a gzip of your entire website, save out as backup on local HD; then try something like this plugin:
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/media-deduper

Not sure it will help. Have not yet tried it.

For a clean install I went through and found the 5 sizes we use and turned the rest off.

In our case we have tons of images from old theme over 10 years, then tons from the new theme of past 2 years.

Somebody is going to make some moola if they develop a plugin to somehow logically scan the media dbase and smart delete based on sizes after building index — e.g., delete all images with size of 423xN if no longer used. Shazam.

I’d pay $50 for that right now.

Probably some kind of way to do this with a php command in the mysql dbase; but no idea how.

Hi, thanks for your suggestions Chris. You’re right about the plugin, he would have my fifty right away too. Meanwhile, I’ll keep on searching for a solution. The idea about the query for mysql sounds promising,

Thank you!

Had to download 72,000 images the other day via FTP. I feel your pain 😉

Then stupidly remembered I could do a ‘backup’ from the server panel and ftp that into one of the other sites as gzip file.

Took a look in the folder and went ….. ouch. Not only all the oddball sizes, but stupid stuff like
main-image-600×450.jpg
main-image-600×450-1.jpg

Waaaah!!!!

So true… 15 hours of ftp files parade against 5 minutes of quiet compression.

I’ll let you know if I find a plugin, combo of plugins, or query to perform the task.

Thank you!

Hi,

Found it Chris (and Bogdan)! This plugin removed 395,254 images/thumbs from my server in around 2 hours (-80% /uploads disc space). It just left untouched the 3 media manager related sizes and the original image. I tested it on wp 4.6, flawless. According to the author new thumbs will be created and stored only when that specific size is called by a block or else. I surfed my site after running it and all necessary thumbs were there, so. You felt my pain, now feel my Joy 😀

Here is the link:
Optimize Images Resizing

Cheers!

Glad to help.

Thanks Bogdan.

O M G !

Will have to try this out.

What sucks is that on couple of sites, the SQL dbase was corrupted back to December and had to use stupid wordpress xml export file, which doesn’t seem to load back in all the image references to the media folder; so I have 70,000 images on one site, but only about 2,000 in the actual media “panel.” I tried a plugin to “scan a folder and add to media list” .. .but that just crashed and burned even with 1GB allocated to php (!).

So, one hurdle crossed. Good job, and thanks for sharing!

As Ren and Stimpy would say “happy HAPPY joy JOY!” 🙂