Question about how Media usage is calculated
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I’m on a Premium plan. My Media quota appears to be 13 GB, with 4.5% used so far.
I’m just experimenting with my site right now (still trying to figure things out before I populate it with real content). For testing purposes I’ve added about 90 images to “Media”.
I have large, high-resolution images. During my testing, I’ve simply grabbed the big image files and uploaded them, without worrying about an appropriate image size for consumption by browsers. I could go through Photoshop and downsample the files, apply tweaks there before uploading (and I might, eventually) but right now I’ve been lazy and have just uploaded large, un-processed images.
I know that most sites/services will take an uploaded image, no matter how large it is, analyze it after upload, then (if it’s quite large) the site will compress/down-sample it to reduce its file size. When serving up the image to browsers, it sends the downsized/resampled image which is more appropriate for browsers. This makes sense, since a 20 MB file isn’t typically needed.
My questions are:
1. Does WP do something similar (that is, if you upload an unnecessarily large image, does it down-sample it)? I’m thinking that surely it must, just seeking confirmation.
2. If yes, does the user have any control over how much compression/other parameters are used? I’m assuming that no, it’s one-algorithm-fits-all, just seeking confirmation.
3. Assuming there is some image processing/compression/downsampling, how is disk usage calculated? Are the smaller (processed/compressed/downsampled) files used to calculate quota, or are the original (unaltered) uploaded file sized used for that calculation?
Hope the above all makes sense. Thanks!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
We compress images to display them in browsers and then serve them via a CDN (Content Distribution Network), however, media storage use is based on the file size of the actual files you upload.
Using high-resolution images is never recommended for websites. The bigger the file size of the image you upload, the more bandwidth and the more time it takes for the images to load when someone visits your site. Given that most computer screens can’t display an image wider than 1200 pixels, or 1600 for widescreen monitors, anything bigger than that is wasting bandwidth and storage.
Having too big files load on your site also causes search engines to penalise your site in search rankings. That is why we use a CDN to serve images, no matter what size you upload them.
To get the most out of your storage space we recommend you optimise your image files, resizing them to the actual size they will display on your site, before uploading them to your media library.
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hi,
WordPress.com does not optimise the size of your uploads although it warns that large files slow down downloads and uploads.
Here is the support page on working with images to learn more:
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