Image Resize Shortcut for WordPress
I wrote my huge Eras Tour post full of images without crashing my server!
How? I created a shortcut to preprocess the images on my phone before uploading them to my blog using the Jetpack app (which is how I usually write posts). I have it added to the Share Sheet and allowed to access Photos.
25% is pretty arbitrary but in experimenting it seemed to get to an image size that’s Good Enough™ for the web at around 1 MB and 1600×1200 or so. It’d be nice to make the full quality photos available but for sharing purposes I think this is fine. There’s probably a more optimal way to size things for the modern web but this works.
While in theory using this shortcut adds a step while composing, I was already often using Favorites in Photos to make my selections before writing. Now instead of the quick heart I have to select photos and invoke the shortcut. (I made it a Favorite Action so it’s near the top of the Share Sheet.) After I’ve posted I delete all of the duplicate shrunken images in the WordPress Uploads album.
In my ideal world, the Jetpack app would do these optimizations automatically locally before uploading all the variants, since my phone is certainly way more optimized for image manipulation than my tiny Lightsail instance. [Update 2025-01-15: It does!] WordPress itself should also be better about doing image processing within resource constraints.
I could probably figure out why my configuration is misbehaving (or just download more RAM) but this shortcut solution was much easier and less time consuming. I’ll probably be using it for years, at least until WordPress fixes this (assuming they’re not too busy being petulant).
Maybe my shortcut will be useful for you as well!
#imageEditing #imageOptimization #ios #iphone #photos #shortcut #wordpress