Beware Autogenerating New Thumbnails – Back up first or…

Hi @wudman

I’d feel the same if that happens to me ??

I had a pretty WooCommerce website. Thought it was time to make my Shop images smaller. So I used the Customizer > WooCommerce > Images to modify my product image sizes. Mature store, well managed, better than average specialized WP host.

When WooCommerce was done Autogenerating new thumbnails, my once uniform sized images now feature at least seven different dimensions. The minority of those images equal the size I input into the Customizer.

I see that you didn’t take a backup first before doing it.

I’d suggest to check your media folder and see if the original image files are changed.

If not, you can try backup the site files and db today, then move to a staging, and then try to revert to the original setting of the WooCommerce > Images section, and see if the images regenerated, if that works. Perhaps you’d do that as well in the live site.

I hope that helps!

Let me know how it goes!

Thanks for the reply. So the rest of the story…

First I recognize the need to back up more often. Daily backups are mandatory, but in cases where a website is “highly active”, for example, an eCommerce website, whenever making any update or change, set a restore point and back up first. That is my take away.

What I left out of the original post is that the “broken” image issue materialized as soon as I saved the changes input via Customizer> WooCommerce>Images. Immediately after using the Customizer, the odd product image sizes materialized. The regeneration wasn’t close to being done. In fact I stopped the regeneration within a minute or so the first time because once I refreshed the site on a different computer, the image issue showed up.

(Checking the site on a different browser and computer verified it wasn’t a local browser cache issue. Purging all caches with the host made no difference either.)

Again, it all looked good up until the moment I used the Customizer and the thumbnail regeneration is just a part of that process. (Sorry WooCommerce, you may be either part of or a victim of other issues.)

For the heck of it, I took a different angle. I copied all my added CSS and pasted it into Notepad for safekeeping. After pulling out all the previously working, error-free CSS, the product and catalogue images returned to a uniform size. Note that the broken images showed up in both the product posts and catalogs.

Taking a deeper look at the CSS there were a few adjustments that overrode the theme’s settings. I pulled that CSS out, restored the rest of the CSS and darn if that didn’t fix the issue. Even resetting Customizer>WooCommerce>Images back to the original settings and letting the thumbnails regenerate did not restore the website with my original functional.

Also the only constant I could identify is that the image size fail seemed to affect products in groups added at certain times. It appears that over the six years of this site’s existence, some combination of WordPress, WooCommerce, and theme (DIVI) updates, have conspired to invalidate some added CSS. Once the Customizer action was initiated, changes were made that invalidated previously working CSS and there was no going back in time.

I still have to figure out why the Customizer isn’t working for resizing the Product images or come up with some new CSS to manage the size and thumbnail. They are currently resolving physically bigger than before, which is also bigger than the uploaded images. Therefore are blurry.

(Since I comment out my CSS and include a date code, I was able to pin down the added CSS to July 2020.)

Hi @wudman,

This is certainly not one of those great experiences and I bet each one of us has had problems at times when working with websites and databases. What I could recommend here is getting in touch with your host. Oftentimes, hosting providers hold a backup copy of your site and database and hopefully yours did it too.

Mirko,
This is a client site and I am pretty demanding about where my client’s should host websites and what basic infrastructure has to be in play if they want my best rates. This website is hosted on a host that has 24/7 support, a separate User Control panel where I can manage the CDN and Backup/Restoration, among other services off site. It took 15 minutes to restore the website and another 15 minutes to revert the website back. Plus the access of backups goes back two weeks.
Hosting matters on so many levels.

Hi @wudman,

Totally agree with you on the hosting points. Good to hear that you’re all set to go after restoring your backup.

Something else that you mentioned earlier:

Customizer isn’t working for resizing the Product images or come up with some new CSS to manage the size and thumbnail.

If the theme author allows you to set the product image sizes via the Customizer but these sizes are not ‘respected’ thus not applied on the front-end even after regeneration, I would also suggest that you reach out to them to check further.

Thanks.

Hi,
As the thread has not seen activity for some time, I’ll go ahead and mark it as resolved.

If you have further questions, please feel free to open a new topic.

Thanks.