WPwatercooler

EP345 – WordPress and big images

November 22, 2019

This week on WPwatercooler we’re discussing has WordPress deals with large images and how the handling of big images will change in WordPress 5.3.

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Panel

Episode Transcription

Jason Tucker: Don’t have an intro. Come on, we still have an intro. I’m going to do it right now. What’s up everyone? This is Jason Tucker. This is WPwatercooler. Episode number 345.

Sé Reed: Oh God.

Jason Tucker: Today’s topic is the WordPress and big images. We’ve come to the point now where we just put in four or five words as the name of this thing and hit the save button and go from there.

Sé Reed: Can we call it Big Time WordPress? I think that’s what we should call it.

Steve Zehngut: Well that’s your term, not the title. Just, that’s all you need.

Sé Reed: Big Time WordPress. That’s what I’m calling it in my head.

Jason Tucker: Yep. Well, we’ll let you know that this episode of WPwatercooler is brought to you by ServerPress, makers of desktop server. If you build websites locally on your computer and you want to be able to do it easily, efficiently and be able to kind of make all those things happen, go over to serverpress.com and take a look at their product. You can download it for free. Go play with it. You get three free sites on there. After that and you can pay them a very small fee and be able to start using that thing to make all the different websites that you’re doing locally on your computer, even in an airplane. So go take a look at it over at serverpress.com.

Sé Reed: Who doesn’t want to work on local websites on an airplane [crosstalk 00:01:05].

Steve Zehngut: Are we talking like a Southwest flight or JetBlue? What are we talking about?

Sé Reed: Spirit. Spirit Airlines.

Jason Tucker: Spirit Airlines.

Steve Zehngut: Spirit. All right.

Jason Tucker: Oh man. Let’s go around the room real quick. Get everyone introduced. Sé, tell us about yourself.

Steve Zehngut: What was that?

Sé Reed: That was Spirit Airlines. You’re like-

Steve Zehngut: Oh. Oh yeah.

Sé Reed: You’re like, “I can’t do this.”

Steve Zehngut: Oh no, I can’t open my MacBook Pro on a Southwest flight.

Sé Reed: Yeah there’s no… it’s not. There’s not. You can’t. You can just do it with Google Glass.

Steve Zehngut: And Mac now is not 15 inch anymore. They’ve gone to 16 inch, so forget Southwest. I got to get first class just to work. Go ahead. Sé.

Jason Tucker: Ah, Sé loves this talking intro. What you got going on Sé?

Sé Reed: Who am I? Who are any of us? Who are we all? My last intro was so lackluster. I was in an existential place. But today I am Sé Reed and I make WordPress [inaudible] media on all the things, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like me listing off the secretaries of state and all the secretaries. That’s what that was. Secretaries. Sorry, that was a political reference.

Steve Zehngut: I got it.

Jason Tucker: How about you, Steve? Tell us about yourself.

Steve Zehngut: I am Steve Zehngut. I am the founder of Zeek Interactive. I forgot for a second. I’m the founder of Zeek Interactive and I run the OC WordPress meetup.

Sé Reed: My existential crisis is flowing through you all.

Steve Zehngut: It is contagious.

Sé Reed: Yeah.

Jason Tucker: Lucy, how about you? Tell us about yourself.

Lucy Beer: I am Lucy Beer. I work doing customer support at WP Rocket, which is a caching plugin, and I blog occasionally at webtrainingwheels.com

Jason Tucker: Awesome. Good to have you on. I’m Jason Tucker. You can find me over @jasontucker on Twitter. I do this show as well as another show called WPblab. Feel free to go take a look at that over at wpwatercooler.com/wpblab. Where you can go watch that and yeah, we talked about social media marketing and all sorts of fun stuff like that. So feel free to go take a look at that.

Jason Tucker: So Lucy, we were looking on make.wordpress.org. Was it Sé? Was that you that looked at it or was it-

Sé Reed: Oh that was me.

Jason Tucker: Okay.

Sé Reed: That was me and the five point… Me and the 5.3.

Jason Tucker: Great, that’s good clearance for that one.

Sé Reed: That’s the next phase. The jingles phase comes after the existential crisis. Every time.

Jason Tucker: Oh man.

Sé Reed: Yeah, no. So I was looking through the 5.3. It has this, well specifically about this new feature, and was going through that, sharing it with my compadres here and Jason highlighted the fact that Lucy was in there being all positive and supportive but also lightly critical and yeah. Is that, that there, Make WordPress blog post and you know the comments are the best part of Make WordPress blogs. [crosstalk 00:03:53].

Steve Zehngut: That was also the best part of Amazon?

Sé Reed: Yeah. The debatable comments are the best part of everything, but on Make WordPress, the comments really have a lot of information in them. Maybe more than the blog post itself.

Steve Zehngut: Define information.

Sé Reed: I mean, look at all this information. You get… the blog post this long and then the comments, this long. And you get so much more back and forth. You get new tickets. You get all sorts of fun stuff. But Jimmy Sid pulled out. That’s there. That’s Lucy Beer, her comments. So we were like, “Oh good, we can wrangle her.” We could force her to come on and tell of her opinion. So it’s not just Sé ranting.

Jason Tucker: Well, what was interesting about this, and we’ll talk about a little bit about this, but just as an aside, that Lucy was telling me that people don’t really look at this site, right?

Sé Reed: What site?

Jason Tucker: No one’s really looking at Make WordPress-

Sé Reed: Nobody except for WordPress [inaudible] people. You know what I mean? Us people, who are like press.

Jason Tucker: Yeah.

Sé Reed: I know, we should have… There should be a name for WordPress sites or something.

Jason Tucker: Oh, it’s like the, yeah…

Sé Reed: “Word pressies.” Word. Word.

Steve Zehngut: Sure.

Sé Reed: Word nerds. WordPress nerds, I guess. I don’t know. Whatever we are.

Jason Tucker: Right.

Sé Reed: Not just community.

Jason Tucker: No, no.

Sé Reed: It’s community squared or something. I don’t know what it is. Deranged, probably.

Jason Tucker: But then, Lucy, you’re saying that if you go and post this over on [Trac 00:00:06:24], somebody picked it up instantly, right?

Lucy Beer: Yeah. I mean, the thing about the Make WordPress blog, at least the maybe two or three times I’ve ever posted a comment on one of them is that it’s a lot of screaming into the void, it feels like. The comments aren’t really monitored by anyone that really has any influence apparently. Andrew Oz started replying to a bunch just recently, but I left my comment on October 10th. So then I just went and made a Trac ticket with the same thing. And I don’t know if it’s normal.

Steve Zehngut: That’s a 39 day turnaround. That’s pretty good.

Sé Reed: Responsive.

Lucy Beer: I don’t know if it’s normal for Trac tickets to get responses quickly, but mine did by Mike [Treader 00:06:16], in fact.

Steve Zehngut: I found it depends on the feature that you’re commenting on, on Trac, right?

Lucy Beer: Right.

Steve Zehngut: It depends on sort of their priority in their roadmap. Because I’ve gotten-

Sé Reed: It depends if anyone personally cares.

Steve Zehngut: Well, I’ve gotten Trac responses immediately and some of them have taken a month, so it depends.

Lucy Beer: Yeah. Yeah. Or I think I got lucky.

Sé Reed: Yeah.

Lucy Beer: I would say.

Sé Reed: So-

Lucy Beer: Not that it’s going anywhere but at least there was, like Mike gave some really good responses at least so.

Sé Reed: So tell us about, if you want to, I can also, but I would rather you do it. I’m sure everyone would rather you do it actually. Frame the 5.3 issue in general, not just your comments, but the issue in general that we were kind of-

Lucy Beer: Okay.

Sé Reed: It was talking about in general.

Lucy Beer: So what’s happening in 5.3 is if you upload a large image and large is defined in pixels, not file size. So if it’s above, I think it’s 2,560.

Sé Reed: 2,056 maybe?

Lucy Beer: Yeah, somewhere around there.

Steve Zehngut: Yeah.

Lucy Beer: If it’s larger than that width, then WordPress will now automatically create another version of that image, which is scaled down to that size. So-

Sé Reed: In addition to those other scaled size images that they’re doing.

Lucy Beer: Exactly. So it’s another, excuse me, it’s another image size. And the idea is that this would be used instead of the full size image. So let’s say you upload an image at 5,000 pixels wide. Instead of loading that onto your page, it’ll load the 2,500 version instead. So it’s better for performance because you’re getting a smaller, lighter image. So there’s good things about it, but it’s not saving any server space because you still have your original image. Now you just have another one as well.

Sé Reed: It’s making more. It’s taking up more server space.

Lucy Beer: Yeah.

Steve Zehngut: It is.

Lucy Beer: So it’s taking up more space. So you’ll get some advantage on the front end of your site, but you still have other issues. So, my comment was basically that I personally feel that this should be communicated somehow to the user that this is happening because right now it’s going to happen.

Jason Tucker: Right.

Lucy Beer: [crosstalk] And if you’re not a word pressie. Yeah, if you haven’t read this stuff, which most people haven’t, you won’t know that it’s happening. And so, that could cause problems and unexpected behavior.

Jason Tucker: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lucy Beer: And also the major thing for me is just that we know that people are doing… It’s not good to upload massive images. So, and obviously this change acknowledges that there’s a problem with that, but by not communicating it, we’re missing the opportunity to actually educate people about not doing it in the first place.

Steve Zehngut: And that education might be, I think you’re right. I think that’s what I was thinking as you were saying it. That might be the better feature is to have a little pop-up or dialogue or something that says, “Hey, this is a large image. It could affect your performance, it could affect page speed, it could affect your server space.” Right? And so all those things I think are important to let people know on the front end that aren’t in the know, right?

Jason Tucker: Yeah.

Lucy Beer: Exactly.

Steve Zehngut: Which is most people that are using WordPress.

Lucy Beer: Exactly.

Sé Reed: I mean the main thing, there’s a bunch of issues with them and that is really elaborated in that. I mean, and it is, this is one of those WordPress things where on it’s face it’s the right thing, but in its execution it got all f’d up because I’m not communicating this. You are now making it so there’s someone uploads their photo, the reality of what happens is different than the expectation. And there’ll be like, “What’s the deal? Why is it doing this?” There’s no explanation without that communication at all that this is happening. And so this is where the WordPress is broken. They’re just like, “Oh, it just doesn’t work. I can’t make this happen.”

Steve Zehngut: The notification I’d actually like to see is something that actually looks into the code of your theme and says, “Hey, this theme is using a very large size image, or you’ve uploaded an image. So this theme is going to use the full size or even the original image that you uploaded.” Right?

Jason Tucker: Yeah.

Steve Zehngut: And so, contact your theme developer or your developer or maybe switch themes, right? Because there is actually a call in the theme that says, “WP attachment.” There’s a couple of different calls for that, where you actually say what size you want to use, whether it’s thumbnail, medium, large, or whatever this new one, I don’t know what this one’s called. Extra large?

Lucy Beer: It’s called scaled.

Steve Zehngut: Ginormous, right? Scaled. Scaled, that’s actually the wrong term for it.

Lucy Beer: No, scaled will get used instead of ginormous, I think.

Steve Zehngut: Okay. So, but I’m saying not all themes are built the same.

Lucy Beer: Right. Right.

Steve Zehngut: And so if they’re not using these best practices, they’re going to load whatever the user uploaded into their WordPress site. And so that’s the notification I’d actually like to see.

Sé Reed: Well not anymore [crosstalk] this one basically by default because they actually link the original image and move it to a whole different thing that has to get called by a query. As far as my reading of it, which, so for example, I have a site that has a press page on it, right? Well, I don’t have a site, but one of my folks I work with has a site that has a press page on it. And on that page I’ve loaded, not the loading version of it, but a link to the full size, full resolution image so that people can download.

Sé Reed: So I just link a little thumbnail to the actual image and I haven’t gone and tested this yet, but based off of my understanding of how this is going to play out, I’m going to have to figure out how to actually even link that image because it’s when you upload it, it’s now moving it to somewhere else. So the original image that I’m uploading, which has the size and the resolution that I’m talking about is not going to be available at the normal path.

Lucy Beer: Exactly, yeah.

Sé Reed: So I won’t even be able to link to it, which now I’m like, “Well before it was easy, I made a little thumbnail and it’s like click here to download the full res picture.” Right?

Jason Tucker: Right.

Sé Reed: Not complicated. Now I’m going to be like, have to write a freaking query in order to get to the original image or put it on Dropbox or put it in Google Drive or something in order to actually link them to the image. Which I’m doing intentionally.

Jason Tucker: Yeah.

Sé Reed: This is an intentional choice.

Lucy Beer: Yeah. It says the scaled down image will be used as the largest available size unless you hack around it like Sé just described.

Sé Reed: Yeah. They’re literally rewriting your image size and not keeping that, they’re keeping it on the server but in some other place and renaming it.

Steve Zehngut: But even that is not the best solution. Right? Because if you have a theme that is putting little thumbnails, right? So maybe post feature images somewhere or small images where you only need, say, 300 wide at the max, and they’re using that over 2000 pixel wide image. You’re talking about a big page speed hit.

Jason Tucker: Yeah.

Lucy Beer: Exactly

Sé Reed: So the other really interesting thing about this is that it’s actually, and this is reflected in some of those comments on that Make posts, is that it is actually upscaling. So I’m not super clear on the differences between PNG 24 and 8, PNG 8. But so people optimize their images. They are actually making the image bigger than-

Steve Zehngut: Than the PNG 24?

Sé Reed: Yeah. So they’re changing the resolution of that photo and making it bigger. So the actual file size is bigger than the image that you uploaded. So if you’re optimizing as a developer, you’re like, “Here’s the code. Here, we’re going to put this up here, I’m using PNG 8,” Right? I think it is. And then it’s changing it, changing your resolution. It’s changing the image size. And in some of those comments, it was changing it to them because of the switch. It’s changing the colors. So-

Lucy Beer: I think, I have a feeling that might get fixed in an update.

Jason Tucker: Yeah.

Sé Reed: I mean, that has to get fixed.

Lucy Beer: Yeah, it seems like it has to. [crosstalk]

Jason Tucker: The reason GD or something like that.

Steve Zehngut: GD library. Yeah.

Jason Tucker: Yeah. So there’s a whole bunch of issues with…

Steve Zehngut: But there’s a setting in there where you can actually say, “Okay, is this PNG 8 or 24?” And compress the right way. You’re not locked in. Right?

Sé Reed: Well-

Lucy Beer: You should tell the core devs that.

Sé Reed: Yeah, you’re actually are with that. And that’s the problem. So that was one of the more interesting things that I thought, not communicating and all of that. I was like, “You’re actually not helping here. You’re actually making this worse.” And again, there’s no way to override it. So there isn’t, and this is, again, going back to that UI issue, right? There’s not a toggle turn off, turn on feature. This is now just happening.

Jason Tucker: Yeah.

Lucy Beer: There is a plugin already available to turn it off.

Jason Tucker: Of course there is. Yeah, there’s what… That’s what people do.

Sé Reed: I got to go get that because this press page, if there’s any new images…

Lucy Beer: It’s literally called Disable the Image Threshold. So, there you go.

Sé Reed: This is one of those problems. This is what I was saying earlier too. It’s like, I don’t like to bitch about this stuff because things are happening and these are solving problems, but this is one of those problems that’s being solved and making more problems.

Steve Zehngut: Well-

Sé Reed: And it’s spawning Trac tickets and plugins and I’m like, “Where is the thought process here of, ‘we’re just making these decisions for users and assuming, what, that no one knows how to, everyone is a basic end user?’” I don’t really understand the thought process of this solution. And this, I think, is just a really good example because we all acknowledge it’s a problem, but it’s not a problem across the board. It’s not a problem for developers or designers or people who are aware of image scaling. It’s a problem for end users who are super just end usery. But that’s not a one size fits all solution. That should just be clapped in. Not a freaking toggle button.

Steve Zehngut: So images, I mean, part of the reason why I have this conversation is because images are the top thing that can affect your site speed and your load speed, right?

Jason Tucker: Okay.

Steve Zehngut: So if you looking at your Google page speed insights score or… What’s the other one? Any of those Pingdom or any of those things that test your site speed, you’ll see the images is the number one thing that shows up next to third party scripts, right? And so, these things do actually matter because all of this factors into your SEO score, right? And so it really does factor into your ranking. And so, one of the services that we’ve looked into recently to replace all of this, it’s called Cloudinary. And so-

Sé Reed: Cloud who?

Steve Zehngut: Cloudinary.

Sé Reed: Cloudinary. That’s ordinary with cloud.

Steve Zehngut: I don’t know who names all this stuff. But-

Sé Reed: I don’t know the name maker.

Jason Tucker: There’s a website, you just hit the button and it generates it.

Steve Zehngut: Yeah. So Cloudinary will take care of a lot of the things that we’ve talked about. And it also acts as a CDN, right? There’s a cost to it. But if you’re worried about this stuff and you’re worried about page feeder, or if you’re getting a low page speed score and images are kind of showing up, even if you don’t understand all the technical jargon, these kinds of things can help.

Sé Reed: Well, I mean, there’s also a ton of plugins that do this. We’ve talked, we’ve had whole episodes that do this stuff. So this is one of those instances again where I’m just like, “Why are we not just using some of the existing plugins and folding that in with their various options and the extensive user testing that has gotten…” I can’t think of any at the moment, but they all start with [inaudible 00:18:31].

Lucy Beer: Insanity?

Sé Reed: Insanity.

Steve Zehngut: TinyPNG is the one that I like, right? And so TinyPNG is also a service, but TinyPNG and those plugins still store the images on your server, right? And so your server speed, your site speed is still affected because you’re serving your own images. Cloudinary [crosstalk]

Sé Reed: So does the 5.3 solution. It is not-

Steve Zehngut: Right? Yeah, absolutely. And the reason I want to separate those out is because services like Cloudinary and there’s another one called, and I can’t pronounce it if it’s I-M-G-I-X, right? Those are actually things that where you’re moving the images off of your site and serving them elsewhere so that you get a benefit and a boost of speed from those services. Right? So your images are actually coming from a CDN rather than your own server.

Jason Tucker: Right.

Sé Reed: I mean, and that though, that’s the more, I wouldn’t even call that advanced. That’s the more intermediate, the next step when you’re thinking about things like page speed.

Steve Zehngut: Totally.

Sé Reed: And so I totally understand how that doesn’t meet the end user, blogger, basic person with their own site, DIYer. Doesn’t meet their needs, which is what 5.3’s big images thing is trying to do. But-

Steve Zehngut: I think trying is the key word.

Sé Reed: Yeah, I mean, I appreciate trying. This always makes me feel so conflicted because I want to support the developments and I don’t want to be just one of these folks who’s like, “Let me jump on this bandwagon and nag and complain about things.” Because I’m not helping in core there. I can’t, being a fucking slack out, to be able to [inaudible] I don’t know what channel, I don’t know who would even tell about anything. [crosstalk 00:20:12].

Steve Zehngut: Look, I’m with you. I’m all-

Sé Reed: In October, that was before 5.3 was out. Right? So this was you bringing that stuff up, before 5.3 was out. And they could have implemented a UI and just popped up a little thing that, the little notice and implemented that, but then they didn’t. So at the same time it makes you feel like, “Okay, so again, what void am I speaking to?”

Jason Tucker: We’d also be here complaining about the notice that popped up and that why did we have this notice pop up on all of our clients’ websites?

Sé Reed: See but that’s what I feel like people would say or it’s a lot of the core devs would say. They’d be like, “Oh whatever. You’ll complain about anything.” And I don’t want to be that.

Jason Tucker: Right.

Sé Reed: I’m not trying to do that, but it feels like that’s what you just are when you say anything that’s kind of, I don’t even want to say critical, but just “analysissal,” analysis.

Steve Zehngut: That’s a word now. That’s a word.

Lucy Beer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sé Reed: We’re providing some alternate perceptive. Like Lucy, you and I both work with end users a lot, right? We train people.

Lucy Beer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sé Reed: We deal with these people and we know, “Hey, this is going to be a UI issue because we deal with the U, let us tell you how to fix the I.”

Lucy Beer: Exactly.

Steve Zehngut: I’m with you, all for progress. I’m glad they’ve made progress. But that’s kind of our job on this show is just kind of sit on the sidelines and-

Lucy Beer: Talk shit about it.

Sé Reed: [crosstalk]

Steve Zehngut: That really should be our tagline, right?

Jason Tucker: The WordPress talk tapes.

Sé Reed: I’m trying not to do that. I mean for the show. Yeah, it’s great, obviously.

Steve Zehngut: We are complaining, but this is constructive feedback and I hope that this gets integrated into a future version.

Sé Reed: I’m sure all the core devs are listening, right?

Steve Zehngut: Oh yeah.

Sé Reed: [crosstalk] attention on their life.

Steve Zehngut: Maybe out of our audience of three we’ll get one.

Lucy Beer: I mean, in my comment, one of the parallels that I try to make about the education part was in one of the previous visions there was a link that was added on the alt text field for images and it links to a document that tells you exactly how you should do alt texts. And I personally learned some stuff from that. So now I do alt texts differently and better. And so I feel like that’s just a really good model-

Sé Reed: Oh my God.

Lucy Beer: -for how we can just make people better users. When we just fix things for them automatically then we’re denying them the opportunity to make everything better.

Sé Reed: Yeah and also-

Lucy Beer: There’s also if you want to get on a different angle, there’s a green aspect to this, right? The more data that you’re processing up to the server, on the server, down to the website, the more your [inaudible] is going to improve. Sorry, increase. So there’s that too.

Sé Reed: I mean, can we be real about how there is the end user of awareness of the fact that computer servers or have any impact on any sort of environmental thing? Whatsoever. We can’t [crosstalk] people to not-

Steve Zehngut: What’s a server? This stuffs all up in the cloud? It’s just up here, it’s just in the cloud.

Sé Reed: [Crosstalk 00:23:28].

Lucy Beer: It’s Cloudinary.

Steve Zehngut: There’s no servers.

Sé Reed: People are like-

Steve Zehngut: It’s just up in the ether.

Sé Reed: “Why would I recycle my aluminum can? What? Why would I use the reusable water bottle?” I don’t even know if, I mean, it would be nice that we could at least introduce that issue on that page where it is a link. I think that alt text example is great because, I mean, I already knew about alt texts, but I always explain it to people, right? Like, “This is what it’s for.” You know they forget, they don’t remember. And then people are just popping keywords in everywhere and they put it in title and they put it in an alt text and they put it in all of those things because they’re just like, “Oh, I’m just supposed to fill this out.”

Sé Reed: Or they remember one component of what I said or whatever. And having that text there, just there by default, this is what this does. And it’s like, “Oh. Oh, that’s what I should be doing here. That’s what this is for.” Right? I love that it’s like, “If this is an important image or it’s just display, leave it blank.”

Lucy Beer: Exactly.

Sé Reed: And people are like, “Oh, okay.”

Lucy Beer: See I learned that from that text.

Sé Reed: We don’t have to treat our user like they’re, I mean, okay, this is going to be really controversial, but we don’t have to treat our users like they’re total imbeciles. Okay. This is like-

Steve Zehngut: How about half imbecile?

Sé Reed: They capable of learning. They are capable of taking in information. This also to that user-developer gap and maybe not even the user-developer gap, but the developer-user… This trust.

Jason Tucker: I want to jump off that real quick if you don’t mind. So we’ve been okay with… How do I put this? We’ve been okay with people uploading huge images to WordPress for a while now.

Steve Zehngut: Have we?

Jason Tucker: Because of the fact that we also give them the ability to crop that image once it’s been uploaded in the media library. I’m not saying it’s good or bad or indifferent. What I’m saying is that we allow people that use-

Sé Reed: Or that it works at all.

Jason Tucker: -that library thing as a way of being able to resize images, scale an image, crop an image. There’s plugins that will actually detect if there’s eyes and make sure that the graphic is this part of your head instead of this part of your head. There’s all those things that exist in WordPress now to kind of make it easier for people to just upload a 12K image from their iPhone 11 Pro and go like, “Okay, what do you want to do now?” And you’re like, “Well I want to crop my image.” And then you go in there and you crop the image using the little cropper tool and then you save it. And it even asks you, “Which way do you want to save it? Do you want to save it as a large image? Do you want to do just the thumbnails?” We’ve given them all these features to be able to work with. So we’re a bit of an enablers.

Lucy Beer: I don’t want them to upload that giant image to begin with. That’s the thing.

Jason Tucker: I know.

Lucy Beer: It’s still digital waste.

Jason Tucker: But we’re giving them all of the abilities to make the changes after it’s been uploaded.

Lucy Beer: Right.

Sé Reed: We have very user option oriented despite the decisions, not options, mantra, which doesn’t make any sense anywhere really at this point. But that’s the thing. It’s like, now we’re suddenly, a lot of the changes in the developments that are happening are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We gave you that choice before, but now we’re just making the choice for you. It’s happening with auto-updates or with all of this stuff.” And I think that’s where kind of the philosophical disagreement comes in because, you’re right, for the last literally 16 years, we have been giving people the capability to do those things, even if they’re not necessarily the most… Like the media library has not been updated since I said don’t use media library because 2000 whatever the hell year that was. Last decade, almost.

Sé Reed: But we aren’t expanding on that. Instead, we’re just now, just making the choices and cutting it off. And that seems antithetical to the whole philosophy, the direction that we’ve been going before. And I feel like that in a way almost… It’s not fair to the users, especially longterm users or people who have been using this. Now we’re just deciding that no one gets to choose anything and we’re not going to give you the option and we’re just making it up and you can go put a query in your theme if you want to call the original image size. [crosstalk]

Jason Tucker: We’ve been talking about this forever. The media library has been talked about forever. On Blab on Watercooler, we’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time [crosstalk] changed.

Sé Reed: Literally for 345 episodes. I’m sure we mentioned the media library in the very first episode of Watercolor.

Steve Zehngut: Just literally to make fun of Sé.

Sé Reed: Yeah [inaudible] to make fun of me. But that’s the thing. What are we? What are we changing this big images thing? But that’s a great point, Jason. Why didn’t this get incorporated? Why not have that toggle button in the media library or be like, “Hey FYI, if you want to change the image settings for this image, go to the media library where you can do a bunch of other stuff.

Lucy Beer: Or on upload, “Hey, we’ve detected this is a huge image. Do you want it scaled or not?”

Jason Tucker: Yeah.

Sé Reed: And then maybe even a little link to be like, “Why would I want to scale?”

Lucy Beer: Exactly.

Sé Reed: “What does that even mean? Are you weighing my image? What?” But seriously, people don’t know what that means necessarily, right? They don’t know large. It’s big image. This is the problem with the end user, they don’t know that, but we’re acting like they don’t even deserve to be told the answer.

Lucy Beer: And there’s also been confusion about this that I’ve seen on Twitter where people are saying, “Oh, WordPress is compressing images now.” And it’s like, “No, they’re just resizing it.” It’s not optimizing and compressing it. That’s different. So yeah. [inaudible]

Sé Reed: What if you’re designing and the majority of your audience, which is, this is a thing you can go look at some of your audience is desktop, some of your audience is mobile. What if you’re using a big screen. And your user is scaling something that is maybe your Tesla and you’re trying to show off your Cybertruck or something and you have a giant image. And you want to really show off the angles.

Steve Zehngut: Weird seeing that around.

Sé Reed: It’s a big image. You can’t now put… Elon Musk can’t put in a 3000×3000 image of his Cybertruck.

Steve Zehngut: That would not fit the whole truck. You got to go bigger than that.

Sé Reed: That’s I’m saying. That’s a big truck he’s got.

Steve Zehngut: You need all the pixels for that trapezoid.

Sé Reed: Yeah. And we’re going to limit Elon Musk to 2,000 and something pixels.

Steve Zehngut: Good luck limiting Elon Musk.

Sé Reed: Yeah. He’s going to be like, “Whatever, that bitch is Shopify.”

Jason Tucker: And with that, we’re over. Thank you very much for coming and hanging out with us. I really appreciate it. Just to let you know iPhone 4S was 3000 pixels wide when you take a photo with that, so. We’ve got some really old-

Steve Zehngut: 3000?

Jason Tucker: 3000 pixels wide. Yep. Talk to y’all later. You have a good one. See ya. Buh-bye.

Sé Reed: Bye. Happy Thanksgiving or-

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