Great for eliminating unnecessary thumbnails. Could use a few UI tweaks.

This plugin works really well in conjunction with image compression plugins like ShortPixel and Imagify, which put a limit on how many images you can optimize with their free plans. Each thumbnail counts as an image, so if you have a lot of custom image sizes set by either your theme or a plugin (Co-Authors Plus, I’m looking at you. And WooCommerce, too), you might be wasting credit on thumbnails that you’ll never even use. Not to mention that I just don’t like the idea of all those thumbnails cluttering up my uploads folders, even though storage space isn’t usually an issue on hosting accounts.

Because it’s technically pretty much impossible (I was researching how to do it) to create only certain sizes of image when you upload them, you have to get rid of the unnecessary ones after the fact, which is what this plugin does.

The UI is a little confusing. You need to check the box labeled “Global Ignore” to delete an image size from a particular post type. To me, “Ignore” suggests that the plugin will skip that image size. A better label would probably be “Remove all” or “Remove from $post_type”. Then you have to save the settings. Then you go back and tell the plugin to clean up the unwanted images.

The other problem is the General Settings (Used as default for all images), and the fact that if you don’t set any of these, you get warnings that the settings haven’t been configured. It’s true that if I have leftover unused image sizes, I might want to get rid of them everywhere. But although it’s hard to specify what image sizes are created when uploading an image, it’s very easy to remove an image size entirely by editing your functions.php file. If the size is created by your theme, find the add_image_size() function that creates it and comment out that line. No more thumbnails of that size will be created. To get rid of a default image size or one created by a plugin, use remove_image_size()

This plugin is useful and pretty much the only one I’ve found that will remove excess thumbnails successfully on WP 4.7, but it could use a little polishing.