Uploading Full Size Image vs Resizing Before Upload

Question

I was wondering what you guys recommend when it comes to uploading photos. I have a bunch of high resolution photos that are being displayed in a slider. I set up the slider to show about 300x200px images for faster loading times.

However, I am wondering whether to just to upload a truer dimension to the original size (say, around 1200x800), and then let Wordpress resize it for the sliders.

The main benefit I can think of is that my images will be more appealing in Google image searches, since a 1200x800 will be clicked more than a 300x200px.

The main downside I can think of would be relying on Wordpress's resizing algorithim, which could be less efficient than resizing it myself. Each page has around 15 images being shown, so if Wordpress does a bad job of resizing the pictures, the load times may suffer badly.

What do you do when uploading images?

Answer 1

If your server has the right libraries the images are resized on upload so the public facing load time should not suffer.

You can add image sizes with add_image_size and retrieve those specialize sizes with functions like get_the_post_thumbnail or get_attachment_image_src, among others.

There are also a lot of post here about image sizes.

You may also be able to use small images in the slider but link to the large size.

You may be mistaken about something though. If what you mean is "upload images full size, use that full size image in the slider, and have it resize to fit when the page display", that isn't WordPress. That kind of resizing is done in the browser, by the browser, and page load time will suffer because there is no alternative but to send the whole image to the client. That takes times, and you add to that the CPU time need to manipulate the image on render.

As to whether any of that will work for you, I can't say as you didn't even mention the name of the slider, so it is pretty much impossible to say how it works or how to achieve what you want in the context of that slider.