Wordpress Media Image Manager -- Creating Lots and Lots of Odd Sized Images

Question

This is odd. Whenever I upload an image, I get a whole myriad of generated files. If I upload test_image.jpg (which is 971x698 pixels in size) I then get the following ten generated files:

test_image-960x447.jpg test_image-650x698.jpg test_image-430x698.jpg test_image-430x283.jpg test_image-260x315.jpg test_image-260x170.jpg test_image-207x136.jpg test_image-185x185.jpg test_image-184x184.jpg test_image-140x94.jpg test_image-140x170.jpg

I'll be honest, I never really looked at this 'feature' before, but something really seems amiss here. Small, medium and large thumbnails make sense. This is weird. Generally speaking the images are cropped about center. Look at the aspect ratios.. sometimes the image is landscape other times portrait. Or perhaps my purchased theme is injecting code somewhere (in this case Deep Focus from Elegant Themes)? All I know is these images are pretty worthless. Is there a place to coherently setup defaults for images when uploaded via Media? (Scale, don't randomly crop, etc?)

I'm using wordpress 3.9.2 with an DeepFocus from Elegant themes with my own child theme. There are virtually no other plugins present. My concern is this just adds confusion to the site, intended for update and daily management by my customer.

(Q) What is causing this behavior?

(Q) Is this core wordpress?

(Q) Anybody know which core functions are involved (so I can hunt down and clean up the mess fix?)

Many thanks, zip.

Update: with the hints provided by Drai, I was able to figure out what happened. This came from the theme.. not sure what those guys are... smoking, er... I mean... thinking.

`

$et_theme_image_sizes = array(
    '185x185'   => 'et-page-full-thumb',
    '650x9999'  => 'et-single-thumb',
    '960x447'   => 'et-featured-thumb',
);

$et_page_templates_image_sizes = array(
    '184x184'   => 'et-blog-page-thumb',
    '207x136'   => 'et-gallery-page-thumb',
    '260x170'   => 'et-portfolio-medium-page-thumb',
    '260x315'   => 'et-portfolio-medium-portrait-page-thumb',
    '140x94'    => 'et-portfolio-small-page-thumb',
    '140x170'   => 'et-portfolio-small-portrait-page-thumb',
    '430x283'   => 'et-portfolio-large-page-thumb',
    '430x860'   => 'et-portfolio-large-portrait-page-thumb',
);`

Answer 1

Wordpress resizes the images when you upload them based on the settings in the functions file in your active theme. If you switch themes it might resize everything again leading to the many sizes, butI'm not sure if that is why you have so many strange sizes.

This is the wordpress page related to the deprecated image function, and this is the newer instruction.

Your theme mentions something about this as well.

Important Note: The WordPress thumbnail function re-sizes the image you upload based on what thumbnail sizes are needed for your theme. Each time you change a theme, you may need to re-generate these thumbnails so that they fit your new theme correctly. You can use the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin each time you switch themes to re-generate your thumbnails. After enabling this theme, you should run this plugin to update all of your old thumbnails to avoid design inconsistencies.

Hope that helps you find the answer.