Resize Settings

The resize settings allow you to save tremendous amounts of disk space. These settings aren't necessarily intended to speed up your site otherwise.

Note: the following settings are available in Ludicrous Mode on the Resize tab.

Resize Detection

This tool was renamed and expanded to the Image Detection feature on the Essential tab.

Max Image Dimensions

Also moved to the Essential tab.

Resize Existing Images

If you have a lot of images already and want those to be resized too, you can check this next box to make sure the bulk optimizer resizes them. Enabled by default in 6.1.6+

Resize Other Images

As you might have already figured out, normally the plugin only resizes images that get uploaded to the "official" Media Library. But what if you have a plugin that lets you upload images, and it isn't using the Media Library? There are a lot of these, some gallery plugins, webform plugins, or plugins related to BuddyPress and WP Symposium. So, if you want the plugin to scale down those images according to the dimensions you've specified, you need this option. Now, the plugin can't hook into every uploader out there to do this automatically, but you can use the Bulk Optimizer or Scheduled Optimizer to track down those images and get them scaled down to reasonable dimensions. That said, other plugins can take advantage of the EWWW IO resizing by simply using the ewww_image_optimizer_resize_upload( $filename ) function.

Preserve Originals

By default, when WordPress core scales down large image uploads, it keeps the original upload on disk alongside the scaled version. This is nice if/when you need to regenerate thumbnails, so that the quality isn't degraded from resizing an already resized image. This is also beneficial when EWWW IO (8.0+) creates WebP versions of your thumbnails, as it will use the full-sized original upload instead of the scaled version as the source image.

But, EWWW IO doesn't keep the originals when scaling down the full-size image. This is great if you need to save disk space, but if you don't have space issues and would rather have higher quality thumbnails, you can use this option to tell EWWW IO to keep the original on hand.

Disable Resizes

A feature that can help save time (and resources) is the ability to disable the resizes that are created by WordPress. Some sites have as many as 20 resizes listed here, so it can be beneficial to look through these and see if you need these to be created or optimized. You can disable all PDF previews by disabling the full-size preview image, since that image is used to build all the smaller thumbnails.