Disable WordPress Big Image Size Scaling

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WordPress is amazing and I am a very big fan of it.

But the version 5.3 brought me (an many others, 1, 2, 3, 4…) a big problem with its new forced feature for auto-scaling down big images.

I am trying to disable it (because I do not need/want it and because it is not working) with the following filter:

add_filter( 'big_image_size_threshold', '__return_false' );

Where the callback function __return_false() is just a WordPress wrapper function to return false.

But it is not working, I still get an error, which means the feature is not disabled.

Same happens with the recommended plugin. It’s not fixing the error.

What error?: Postprocessing failed, please scale your image under 2500px.

I did clean the browser cache, set PHP version to 7.2 and activated mbstring (as suggested by others regarding the same problem).

The error happens for some uploads, not for all of them:

And it has nothing to do with uploading big images.

Here are a few facts describing the issue:

  • I am doing random screenshots of random areas (means random sizes).
  • I am always doing small rectangles (max 800px x 400px)
  • Some images will upload fine.
  • Other images will not.
  • But the specific images that work always work if I retry uploading several times.
  • And the specific images that don’t always don’t if I retry uploading several times (even when renamig the file).

5 Answers
5

I have the same issue with not being able to turn off big_image_size_threshold (one of the worst new features WordPress has ever put out) for kicks I tried removing the quotes around return false but it doesn’t resolve the issue. The example in Codex does in fact show quotes. https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/_return_false

I have opened a ticket in core tracker for this, possible bug.

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