Image Processing Queue

Image Processing Queue is an alternative to on-the-fly (OTF) image processing (e.g. Aqua Resizer) for WordPress themes.

Like OTF image processing, it allows theme developers to define image sizes for specific theme contexts rather than defining a size for all uploaded images. This greatly reduces the number of resized images and hence reduces disk space usage and the wait time when uploading an image.

Image Processing Queue differs from OTF image processing in how it behaves when an image doesn’t exist yet. OTF generates the image right away and the end-user has to wait for the image to be generated. With Image Processing Queue there’s no waiting. It immediately returns an image that already exists (that is the closest fit to the image size requested) and adds the image size to a queue. Image sizes are quietly generated in the background using WP Queue.

Image Processing Queue also accommodates responsive themes much better than OTF. It allows theme developers to define a list of image sizes that will work best for their theme’s responsive breakpoints. Images generated by Image Processing Queue are added to the post meta so that WordPress core’s responsive functions will automatically add them to the srcset and delete them from the filesystem when the image is deleted from the Media Library.