Maximum supported image size?

It’s entirely possible that processing that image is blowing out the memory that your WP installation can use.

Check your system’s error logs to see if there are errors. I doubt that Hostgator will let you assign 1GB of memory to your WP site.

ProTip: WordPress is not an image editor. Use a program like GIMP to scale, crop, and size the image to a size you need and upload that.

Hi thanks for the answer, but yes I can assign 1GB of memory.
See php configuration (dear visitor from the future, this like may not work anymore since exposing server internal information is not a good security practice: https://dewors.ninja/phpinfo.php)

I do agree with you that wordpress is not an image editor, I just want him to generate thumbnails for his own UI. I really want very big image (panorama) to be displayed in my blog. It will be a photography blog with big panorama you can open on your 4K screen, I have nice shots of birds with feathers details so nice. I don’t want to refactor all my blog in 2 years because 4K screen is now the norm.

I listen to full HD streaming video everyday over http, I manage these large panorama on my phone! Somehow it’s normal I cannot upload 6MB picture of a sunset? Ok, I can display it, it’s WP UI who can’t handle it because it need the thumbnail to work properly otherwise the full image is used (in my case) and shrink with CSS. When you have a lot of such image… it become so slow it’s useless.

I’m kind of sad because I have some knowledge of wordpress, and I have already use some advanced theme… now I think I will need to learn an other blog engine / CMS. So I come back to my question: what is the limit in wordpress?
A variable? somehow it’s not the memory (or is 1GB still not enough?)?

Ho and by “Check your system’s error logs” I didn’t find any error output for WP, maybe I didn’t dig deep enough but can’t find debug mode, error logs, I can log on the server (ftp), I’ve dig into process logs but hostgator look like greedy on logs.

Any idea is welcome.

The processing for a 6MB image can easily be 2-3 GB.

A general “rule of thumb” for this is width x height x 4. So, with your example image (3855 x 2956 pxiels and ) you’d be using somewhere aorund 43MB just for the memory use for the original image before any processing takes place. Anything larger will use exponentially more memory as it needs to keep track of so many more times the number of pixels.

The solution to this is not what you want to hear.

Your first option is that you can either pay the extra for a VPS or dedicated server that will allow you to assign more RAM to the processes, but there’s still no real upper limit on how much RAM would be needed for each process as it will depend on each indvidual image (size, quality, etc).

The second option is to start off with two seperate images. One as your full-sized image, and one being a re-scaled version kept to somewhere around 1600 to 2000 pixels on the largest axis. These will normally be able to be processed by most shared hosts. You would need to upload the full-sized version using FTP and keep that outside of the WordPress media library, but you would be able ot use the link to the image when it’s needed. It’s a pretty hacky sort of work around, but web servers and browsers are really not meant to use images that are that high-resolution and file size.

Thanks! This is the kind of information I was looking for. So I can try to increase the RAM until Hostgator stop me (mouhahahaha).

Actually I can go in the 2000 range but got an explosion somewhere in the 3000 range.

This kind of hack is well inside my day to day job, but it will be issue with collaborators. My main point against such a hack it’s that the “big image” won’t be available in all the fancy stuff of WP ecosystem.

Thanks again, this should be documented something like: “-WP recommended maximum size image”. I’ll continue to dig but without looking to “FIX my WP”.

I’m ad it’s small 2000px wide, a lot of today screen are in this range.

There’s no way to documenta “recommended” maximum inage size. Every host is different, and every server setup will handle things differenly, so no one recommendation will cover even a small percentage of installations out there. The problem is that if there’s and documentation that’s even semi-official that says (as an example) “Recommended maximum image sizs is 2000 x 200 pixels and 2MB” you will *always* find people that say “My image is less than that, so why doens’t it work?? It’s all WordPress’ fault!” when it’s really their host that’s restricting them.

Got it, still, I’ve found a bunch of people digging the issue without clear answer. I guess it’s hard to support open source projet deployed everywhere.

I know those who support wordpress are smart and already think of that obvious thing like that. Sorry, I didn’t wan’t to be condescendent. I’m still using wordpress and will probably reuse it in the future. Thanks you for answers!