I have a cool autoblog working with Wordpress, but a problem I've run into is that the images that get imported along with the RSS feeds are taking up lots of disk space. And I really don't need to have the full size images that are downloaded; I just want a smaller thumbnail image.

So I've been looking for an easy and smooth solution to manage all of the oversized images on my Wordpress site.

Let me introduce to you, Imsanity.

Imsanity is a Wordpress plugin that will scale down the size of my images to save disk space. It can do this automatically for every image that is saved in Wordpress. It can make sure that images are resized to within a length and width that I specify. And it can apply bulk resizing to all of the images I already have uploaded. 

When I realized the problem I had with image space being taken up too rapidly, I noticed that my wp-content folder was taking up 2.9 GB of space. I've only been running this blog for about a month, so in a year from now, at that rate, the directory will take up about 30 GB of space. I needed to trim down the size of those images.

Installing Imsanity

You install Imsanity just like any other Wordpress plugin.

Using Imsanity to Automatically Resize Wordpress Images

Imsanity comes configured after install with some default settings that will automatically resize any new images you upload. The default resize setting is set at a default width of 2048 pixels, and height of 2048 pixels. If you like those height and width settings you don't need to do anything else and you can just make posts and Imsanity will automatically resize your images within this size. 

You can also set the JPG quality, which defaults at 82. 

I set my images to be resized to 1024x1024 and the quality to 75.

Using Imsanity to Bulk Resize Your Wordpress Images

With some default settings in place. Imsanity can also resize any existing images stored in the wp-content directory of your Wordpress site. My wp-content directory was growing fast and I'm glad that I have Imsanity to stop saving images in such a large size, but I needed the existing images shrunk.

For that I used the Bulk Resize Images feature of Imsanity. 

With the click of a button, Imsanity found oversized images and I was prompted to decide whether I wanted to resize them. Of course I wanted them shrunk. It even tells you the size of the image before resizing it. 

Imsanity's bulk resize function only works in batches of 250, so you'll have to run it many times if you have a lot of images. But don't worry, once all of your existing images are resized, Imsanity will resize any new images you upload.

Conclusion

I'm not too advanced when it comes to Wordpresss and this simple plugin made it easy to resize all of my Wordpress images, and to resize any Wordpress images automatically in the future. 

The Imsanity plugin was straightforward in how to use it and it worked without bugs. 

This plugin is actively maintained and is trusted by thousands of Wordpress users.

I'd definitely give Imsanity a try if you want to shrink the images of your Wordpress install.