In How To Set The WordPress Media Settings, I mentioned that if you change your media settings, WordPress will create new image sizes for you as you upload new images but will not re-create your existing images.
The solution to this problem is found in an elegant plugin called Regenerate Thumbnails written by Viper007Bond.
Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings -> Media) after previously uploading images or have changed to a theme with different featured post image dimensions.
You can either regenerate the thumbnails for all image uploads, individual image uploads, or specific multiple image uploads. ~ From Plugin Description Page
Using Regenerate Thumbnails is a breeze. As is mentioned above, you can re-size all of your thumbnails (images) or you can re-size them individually via the media library.
Resizing All Thumbnails
To regenerate every image in the library, just surf to Dashboard / Tools / Regen. Thumbnails. Click the Regenerate All Thumbnails button. If you have a lot of images, this will take a while, the amount of time being dictated by factors such as number of images, image sizes and how fast your host’s server is. Just let the plugin do it’s job.
About 6 months ago, we decided to change the home page layout at Life As A Human and used Regenerate Thumbnails to re-create several new image sizes for the home page and sidebar images. We had well over 1400 articles at that time and about 6000 images. It took a while but the plugin preformed flawlessly. (Great code Alex!) By the way, to do this meant we had to reset the image sizes specified in our Genesis theme’s functions.php file. I will cover that off in a separate article.
Resizing Individual Images
Re-sizing individual images is a snap. As per the images below, you have 2 options here. You can re-size individual images or select multiple images to re-size.Â
For individual images, just surf to Dashboard / Media / Library and hover over the image you want to re-size. Click Regenerate Thumbnails.
For multiple images, again, surf to Dashboard / Media / Library and select the images you want to re-size. Click the Bulk Actions drop down and select Regenerate Thumbnails.
I consider this an essential plugin. Whether you are a developer or just run one blog, if you ever need to change image sizes, this is the best solution I have found. If you use it, be sure to drop Viper007Bond (Alex) a note and let him know what a great piece of code this is and go give it a vote at wordpress.org.
Photo Credits
Screen Shots From Plugin Description at wordpress.org
WordPress Logo On Thumbnail – GNU General Public License
Plug – Image from the Microsoft Clip Art Collection
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