No; that is not a typo. Today I learned about a WordPress plug-in named “imsanity,” and yes, that is how it is spelled. Imsanity is not a well-kept secret—it has been downloaded over 45,000 times—but I had never heard of it until this morning.
I got an e-mail overnight letting me know that we had reached 80% of our disk storage quota on our QTH.com web-hosting account and asking me to delete files or contact the administrator to request an increase in our quota. I figured I would do both so I started by contacting QTH.com to make the request. I had been thinking for a while that I should go back and resize the photo files I uploaded to the website and blog, so the disk quota issue spurred me to action.
When we started the website/blog last year I was not familiar with digital image manipulation software and did not know how to resize an image for the web. I do now, of course, but I had uploaded some 300 high resolution JPEG files before I learned how. At 3.0+ MB each, our website/blog swelled to almost 1.0 GB of disk storage after only two months. Clearly that was not going to be sustainable, but going back and fixing it was going to be a big job, and deleting them was not an option I was willing to entertain.
I was pondering the prospect of spending several weeks re-sizing images, uploading the image files, inserting them into old blog posts, deleting the original images from the blog posts, and finally deleting the old, large image files, all without making a mistake. My guess is that I would never have accomplished this task, if I ever started. I am, frankly, fairly busy with projects going forward and really had no interest in spending that kind of time fixing archival material.
And then a pair of e-mail replies arrived from Scott at QTH.com; my disk allocation had been bumped up, giving me some breathing room, followed by a recommendation to check out the “imsanity” plug-in for WordPress. Not only do the QTH web-servers run extremely well, their technical support is second to none.
Imsanity is an insanely simple, but incredibly useful plug-in. It can be used to retroactively re-size images in a WordPress site, which is exactly what I needed to do. A few simple parameters establish the maximum horizontal and vertical image size for several categories of image use and the quality of JPEG to be created. A simple search function identifies up to 250 image files that exceed the maximum limits. You can select all of them at once or select individual files to process (as many as you want). Click a button and it works its way through the list. I accomplished in an hour what I thought would never get done, with no visible change in the old blog posts since the displayed size of the images is always smaller than the file size. The only difference is that now when someone clicks on one of the images the largest it will appear is 1024 pixels horizontally or vertically. The resized image files s are less than 1/6th the size of the originals, a significant savings in the use of disk space. It also means that web pages and blog posts will load more quickly. The other use of imsanity is to resize image files as they are uploaded if they exceed the maximum dimensions set in the plug-in’s parameters. I am now resizing all of our photos before I upload them, so I should have less need of that capability.
Linda made a Swiss Chard with quinoa (instead of couscous). Magnificent. She has entered the recipe into the recipe section of our website.