On my WP site (which sells retail products), I have large images (up to 4000×4000 px) so people can zoom in. Unfortunately, when adding images to a page and using the Media Library, the images all load up at full quality (though resized down). This makes the Media Library page load up really slowly, and make my browser slow to a crawl. Why is it doing this? Why isn’t the ML page using thumbnails? If I click on “Media” on the left admin menu, that list of images are proper thumbnails, but when adding media to a page, the list that comes up is using full quality images.
Is this a bug in WP?
4 Answers
If you server does not have the right image libraries installed WordPress can’t create actual thumbnails, but can only resize them in CSS. I suspect that that is the problem.
Create a file on your server and put <?php phpinfo(); ?> in it. Then load that file. You will get a table of server configuration information. Look for the presence of PHP’s image libraries. I am pretty sure WordPress uses Imagemagick if available, then GD, then nothing. I may be wrong about that though. I am not terribly familiar with the media subsystems.
You can also check the wp-content/uploads folder to see if images are being created in multiple sizes.
It is also possible that a plugin or theme has disabled the image generation.
