Questions about EWWW Image Optimizer

1. If you just install the plugin, and don’t run the Bulk Optimize, this is exactly what will happen. It NEVER optimizes previous images unless you tell it to.

2. If you refer to new images, not really, but you could just deactivate it, or disable all the tools (jpegtran, optipng, etc.) when you don’t want it to auto-optimize anything. If you’re going to go through that hassle, you might as well just download an optimization program for your computer, and skip this plugin.

3. No, metadata is not removed by default, which is why there is a checkbox on the settings page to remove metadata. It defaults to OFF (no metadata removed), and must be manually turned on to enable any metadata stripping (EXIF and such).

1) Great. I didn’t install it yet, as I was worried it starts the optimization by default.

2) That would be great if you could consider it as a feature request – to have the option to choose which images to optimize in every post. Would you consider it for future or you don’t like it?

3) If the lossless optimization doesn’t remove exif and color profiles, what does it remove? (I read the G. Pagespeed docs, but didn’t find details about that).

2. No. I think everything should be optimized. You have nothing to lose, and bandwidth, power, storage, and other things to gain.

3. Related to #2, I’m not sure you understand lossless optimization. It doesn’t remove anything (unless you tell it to remove metadata). Lossless optimization is the process of re-encoding the image data in a more efficient manner. No image data is changed, the pixels stay right where they always were. This is a result of cameras trying to be speedy (which is good for the photographer, but bad for websites), and software like Photoshop using poor defaults when images are saved. We had an image at work that was 90% Photoshop metadata.

Hope that helps clear things up.

2) Usually yes, but in my case it doesn’t work like this. There are some images that must be intact as they come from the photo camera. For example aesthetic treatments photos. There are people that can complain if they see that the photos do not have metadata or if they “recognize” somehow that the photos have been edited.
If instead the photos are exactly as they come from the photo-camera they would better believe that what is shown in the pictures is real. For example if you shoot a beautiful face and you don’t change anything, but you just resize the image with Photoshop, people usually won’t pay for those services because they will think the photo has been altered and ‘photoshopped’.

3) I think your explanation made me understand it lossless optimization better. And I am more interested in trying it… and even applying it to all the blog.
Any way to try exactly the same kind of optimization it on a specific set of images? Or on WordPress or on Windows environment?

P.s. by the way thank you very much for your detailed and excellent support answers.

In the Media Library, there will be links next to each image to optimize one at a time, or you can select multiple images, and run them through the bulk optimizer in smaller batches this way.

For further clarification (and I begin to understand your concerns now), if you compare an original from the camera with a version optimized by jpegtran, the ONLY difference will be filesize. Pixel for pixel, the images will be identical, it is simply the backend encoding that has changed. There is no quality decrease, or resizing, or anything of that nature.

Thank you so much.

To conclude I understand that “the ONLY difference will be filesize” only if I choose the options to not remove the metadata. If I remove the metadata of course there will be some difference.

Is there any other option I should leave checked/unchecked apart from metadata that will lead to only a filesize difference?

P.s. Are you aware of the Google PageSpeed insights algorythm? Do you think (or know) whether the images optimized by your plugin AND with metadata (metadata not removed) will pass the PageSpeed Insights tests?

Google Pagespeed expects you to remove metadata, so if you don’t check the remove metadata option, I would suspect that it will still flag your images as unoptimized. But, since it sounds like you need to preserve the metadata, there is not much else you can do.
I would expect that you will still see a significant reduction just with the standard optimization (preserving metadata). If most of your images are straight from the camera, there should be minimal amounts of metadata compared with something that is photoshopped.

Hopefully ??

Thanks much for now. Great support! ??