Disable WordPress Image Sizes - How-to

WordPress wants to do us some good by generating additional image sizes. If you know what you’re doing, and you definitely don’t need these image sizes, you can disable them. I’m talking about the default sizes medium_large (768 x 0), 1536×1536 and 2048×2048.

This way we avoid that tons of additional thumbnails are generated which are not used at all. Since WordPress 5.3, the two very large image formats have been added. Get rid of them!

Disable image sizes you don’t need

In the source code these image sizes have the following names:

• medium_large
• 1536×1536
• 2048×2048

Add the following code to your functions.php file or use the Advanced Scripts plugin.

/*
 * WordPress: Remove unwonted image sizes.
 * In this code I remove the three sizes medium_large, 1536x1536, 2048x2048
 * See full article: 
 */

add_filter('intermediate_image_sizes', function($sizes) {
  return array_diff($sizes, ['medium_large']);  // Medium Large (768 x 0)
});

add_action( 'init', 'j0e_remove_large_image_sizes' );
function j0e_remove_large_image_sizes() {
  remove_image_size( '1536x1536' );             // 2 x Medium Large (1536 x 1536)
  remove_image_size( '2048x2048' );             // 2 x Large (2048 x 2048)
}

» The Code as Gist

This is how it looks like in the mentioned plugin:

Default WordPress Image Sizes

By default, without additional sizes from the theme or plugins, WordPress handles seven image sizes.

WordPress offers the settings in the admin only for thumbnail, medium and large.

I use the following three image sizes for new pages and disable all others with the code snippet above.

• Thumbnail: 400 px (Half post size and Thumbnails)
• Medium: 800 px (Width for blogposts)
• Large: 1200 px (Width without sidebar)

Tip: How to add an image size column to the library

Conclusion

WordPress doesn’t always do exactly what you want. However, with a little custom code, many settings are possible that you won’t find in the WordPress Admin.

I also made a post about tools for creating images.

I hope this tutorial on how to disable WordPress image sizes helps you. If not, feel free to ask in the comments.