The way WordPress handles large images has always been a topic of discussion for users and developers.
There are generally two types of images that are uploaded:
- Images that have been edited or created in an image editing application.
- Photos that are uploaded either directly from the camera or haven’t been edited.
In the first case, the images are usually “web-ready”. They may have been scaled down to an appropriate size and optimized.
In the second case, the images are usually much bigger than needed and are not optimized for web use. A photo taken with an average modern smartphone is easily over 5MB in file size. Photos taken with a good quality camera can be much larger.
WordPress 5.3 introduces a new way to manage these images by detecting big images and generating a “web-optimized maximum size” of them.
How does it work?
When a new image is uploaded, WordPress will detect if it is a “big” image by checking if its height or its width is above a big_image threshold. The default threshold value is 2560px, filterable with the new big_image_size_threshold filter.
If an image height or width is above this threshold, it will be scaled down, with the threshold being used as max-height and max-width value. The scaled-down image will be used as the largest available size.
In this case, the original image file is stored in the uploads directory and its name is stored in another array key in the image meta array: original_image. To be able to always get the path to an originally uploaded image a new function wp_get_original_image_path() was introduced.
Disabling the scaling
The scaling is controlled by the big_image_size_threshold filter. Returning false from the filter callback will disable it.
add_filter( 'big_image_size_threshold', '__return_false' );
For reference on this change, see Trac ticket #47873 and changesets [46076] and [46353].
#5-3, #core-media, #dev-notes
