I’m going to just jump in here, because I think this needs more awareness.
I have just stumbled across this ‘feature’, although I consider it a bug, and one that has forced me to delete the plugin and look elsewhere, which is a shame as up till now, this seemed the perfect plugin to use for ease of use.
I have loads of images already uploaded, to the correct sizes, with ALT tags specified etc. I want to be able to create albums and include these photos in there.
I did not want to create any duplicates that aren’t needed, as this makes the media folder look incredibly messy now, not to mention taking up twice as much file storage space as needed, this is not good.
There’s no mention of this happening in your plugin description, and it should be added. Also, deleting the plugin left this folder inside uploads there, and has not been deleted.
Can you change the format of this, to not create duplicates? You don’t need to. Just leave the photos where they are, and reference them.