Hello @jayplotkin !
I trust you’re having a great week!
I see that you’ve opened a ticket for Hummingbird, however Hummingbird doesn’t perform image optimisation at all. We’ve also never had any reports of Hummingbird’s caching impacting the number of images created, so most likely it’s an issue related to an image optimisation plugin or some very odd plugin conflict.
Can you let us know if you’re also using any image optimisation plugins on the site? If you’re using Smush, I would suggest the following:
In Smush >> Bulk Smush > Image Sizes section – please select Custom and select only the image sizes that are in actual use on the site. This will limit the number of image sizes created/optimised. You can find out more about this here: https://wpmudev.com/docs/wpmu-dev-plugins/smush/#image-sizes
The image sizes are actually being created by WordPress based on additional sizes added by plugins and themes. When Bulk Smushing images, Smush will create missing image sizes as well so this may increase the usage of storage. The reason for this is that Smush will use those image sizes to add them in img tags on the site – when a browser notices that multiple sizes are available, it will download the size that most fits the actually displayed size on the screen. So instead of using the biggest image, it will download the one closest to the actual dimensions, saving bandwidth and thus speeding up the loading of the site. So here we exchange increased storage space for faster loading whenever possible, which is what’s important to visitors and search engines.
Please let us know if you have any questions – and if the issue may be something else, please also share any additional details that may be useful in replicating the issue or testing.
Kind regards,
Pawel
