steerpike58

Stef – thanks for following up and sorry for the delay in responding. Let’s try this:

1. I sign in to my wordpress account at http://www.wordpress.com .
2. I am presented with a list of my sites. These include the site hosted at wordpress.com, and my self-hosted site that has the jetpack plugin installed. This discussion focusses on the self-hosted site that has jetpack installed.
3. On that page, I see headers ‘Site’, ‘Plan’, ‘Status’, ‘last published’, ‘stats’, and ‘actions’.
4. Under ‘actions’, there’s an option for WP Admin, but that takes me to the NATIVE WP Admin for my site. If I click on ANY of the entries under the columns mentioned above, I’m also taken to the NATIVE WP Admin for my site. But – if I click on the entry for ‘Stats’ I’m taken to the admin for my site, BUT – it’s the wordpress.com admin. Url shows: https://wordpress.com/stats/day/<mySite>. And from there, I can click on ‘Media’, and see the media tab with Jetpack options (because the ‘admin’ is coming from the wordpress site, not my self-hosted site).
5. All I want to know is – how ‘ELSE’ can I get to that same admin panel, other than by clicking on the ‘stats’ entry in the grid?
6. As I said – I STUMBLED across the fact that I can type https://wordpress.com/media/<mySite&gt; – but it’s not customary to expect people to enter complex URLs these days – SURELY there is a navigation method ‘somewhere’ – a place to click and be taken to the media tab.
7. I’m happy to share screenshots with you showing specifics, but you’ll need to reach out to me at my email address.

I don’t consider it ‘solved’ because I can’t imagine that clicking on ‘stats’ is the only, or the intended, way of navigating. But it does work so I can get by with it. SURELY there’s a more obvious way to navigate?

Thanks!

Thanks again for the responsive and detailed reply. From what I’m reading, and seeing with my own testing, is that WP will generate at minimum FOUR variants – there are the thumbnail, medium, and large that are governed by the settings/Media page, and apparently at least one more that is referred to as “Medium-Large” that was added along the way to the core WP code, but never added to the ‘Settings/Media’ page – this is showing as 768x in my directory. So that’s 150x, 300x, 768x, and 1024x with everything at default. Then I see two additional sizes – 1536x and 2048x (this assumes your source image is > 2048, of course). Apparently these SIX images are now considered standard. Why doesn’t WP modify the very simple settings/Media page to reflect this? It’s a rather simplistic screen and wouldn’t be hard to change.

There’s also a concept called “web-optimized Maximum size”, and this is set by default to 2560x. This was introduced in WP 5.3 (this is based on what I’m reading on the issue – feel free to correct me). The image that is created by this latter process is given the suffix ‘-scaled’. So if you leave everything at default, and you upload an image that is, say, 2800x or 3000x, you will get EIGHT images – 150x, 300x, 768x, and 1024x,1536x, 2048x and 2560x (labeled -scaled). This is what you get ‘out of the box’ BEFORE themes come into play; they can change or add to this list. I see all these images in my test environment, which is using the freebie / minimalist ‘fewer’ theme. What’s really odd is, if I upload an image that is 4000x rather than 3000x, I only get 2 generated variants – 300x, 2560x, (‘-scaled’) plus the original 4000x!

So that now fully explains the ‘how’ of all the images I’m finding in the upload directory structure.

When I place an image in a simple post or page (using the block editor, no coding here), I don’t get to chose the ‘variant’; I only get to choose the base image. And I believe this is where the ‘srcset’ concept comes into play – I’m not really placing an actual ‘image’ on the post, I’m placing a reference to a list of images, with the idea that the best image will be chosen ‘at run time’ (when end-user visits the page. This I understand the concept of. Testing/validating this is happening is quite hard when you get to mobile and tablet devices, as they are less well-endowed with tools. I also note that my smartphone (S23+) has a screen resolution of circa 2500x, so in theory one could argue, it ‘deserves’ the biggest image available (the ‘-scaled’ version). So maybe all that is working as well as it can be expected to work.

The other thing I noticed is, when I place an image using the block editor, I DO get a chance to choose image size. Over on the right, after placing the image, I can choose the ‘resolution’ drop-down, and there I see: thumbnail, Medium, Large, Full Size options. I tested, and sure enough, they place the 150x, 300x, 1024x, and 2560x versions. There’s no choice for the ‘medium-large’, or the two ‘extra’ sizes mentioned above. So I would HOPE that, by specifying a size here, I’m constraining the max size that will ever be delivered. But I’m happy to go with the ‘Full Size’ since 2560x is no longer considered a large size by most device standards.

So my final concern/question here is in relation to ‘featured image’. When I choose a ‘featured image’, that image is likely to be used in TWO types of scenarios at least. I may have a full-sized featured image placement somewhere (the only image on the page, close to ‘full width’), and that would logically be using the 2560x variant (‘-scaled’). But another common use for ‘featured image’ is when displaying posts in a list or grid format, with a mixture of images and text. The image in this case is only occupying perhaps 1/6th of the screen width, which would suggest that the 768x variant (‘medium’) would be appropriate. But my ‘inspect’ tool in chrome is telling me that the 2560x version is being used for all these. Here’s a test page I’m using to place a ‘grid’ of 5 posts with featured image and title displayed; as you can see, they are VERY small, but I can see that behind the scenes each ‘cell’ is being fed a 2560x image.

View post on imgur.com

Thanks again for engaging in the discussion!

Thanks for the informative response. I understand the theory behind the multiple size-variants of an image, but what I don’t understand is their usage. I understand the concept of responsive design and performance, but what I don’t see is WP making use of any of the smaller sizes.

Are you saying that WP will deliver a DIFFERENT version of an image depending on the device displaying the image? So for example, if I pull up my page on my phone, a different version of the image is being delivered by the server compared to when I display the same page on my desktop computer? I just did a test on my phone and from what I can tell, the phone got the same ‘scaled’ (2560x) version of an image.

I also used ‘inspect’ in my desktop browser to see exactly what image is being served to me, and even on the page full of ‘featured images’, they are all the ‘2560x’ version – so this doesn’t appear optimized to me.

But perhaps even more relevant – if I upload a 3000x or 4000x image, WP spits out all the different sized variants, but does not even reference the original in its internal tables. So that 4000x original is sitting there, in the file system, just taking up space.

Ah – my apologies – I’ll post the plug-in question there.

In the meantime, though – while that plugin may help me by SHOWING me the current featured image size, I already know that, in the test cases I’ve been using, the featured images are the 2560x versions of the image. So the question I’m trying to answer is – what is the point of WP creating several different sizes, only to use the biggest size when showing 5 featured images side-by-side on a page (I’m guessing a 500x or at most 1000x image would be more than adequate).

And is there any way for me to control what sized variant of the image is used? As noted, when I upload an image, WP auto-generates a 150x, a 300x, a 768x, a 1024x, variant for use in exactly this type of situation. But when I choose the featured image, I only get to choose the ‘general image’, not any particular sized version.

I did some further research and found that when an image is uploaded to WP, a pair of entries get made in the ‘post_meta’ table. The ‘_wp_attached_file’ meta_key gets meta_value’ of the ‘scaled’ version of the file (so that’s the ‘primary’ image reference) and the ‘_wp_attachment_metadata’ meta_key gets a reference to the 225×300 version and the ‘scaled’ version, but NOT the original. So even though the 4000x version was uploaded, it looks like it is never referenced within the database and so is a huge waste of space. Am I understanding this correctly?

It seems like the logic is – upload the file; create multiple size variants; reference ‘most’ of those variants in the ‘wp_attachment_metadata’ entry, but not the ones over 2560x in size.

I’m really curious where the logic is that decides what size variants to spin off!

OK, I finally got this to work. I installed the jetpack plugin (there are at least 8, by the way – need to pick the first one) – “Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, and Growth – Improve your WP security with powerful one-click tools like backup, WAF, and malware scan. Includes free tools like stats, CDN and social sharing.” (not at all obvious that it’s this one!). Then say ‘no’ to every option / feature / upsell, but then go in and configure it so you can log into your site using wordpress.com.

Then – magically – you will ‘see’ your self-hosted site as one of the ‘sites’ available. But then I don’t know how you are supposed to do the ‘media’ thing … but I guessed at it based on the screenshot in a previous post:

https://wordpress.com/media/<yourSelfHostedSite&gt; – and that does it!

I can’t find any good documentation on this on the web. Everyone just says ‘install jetpack plugin’ and that’s it!