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I can verify that this is now working on Hostgator with PHP 7.0. Thanks kaputz!

Thanks for taking a look at things. On the one site, I think I narrowed down the culprit to the Jetpack Tiled Gallery plugin. It automatically uploads the photos to the WP Photon CDN. Photon will resize photos to whatever fits your page.
https://jetpack.com/support/photon/#how-photon-works
It will also cache said photo “forever” and the database links to the CDN image, not the file folder on the server. This would be why when I recompress the sizes do not match up. It’s also why it is apparently only affecting “medium” sizes, The blog in question has all the photos set to medium. Currently the only photos that have the “modified after compression” flag are also on a tiled gallery.

What I think happened:

at some point in the past I’m pretty sure I had toyed with using Photon. With the merging of two blogs about 6 months ago it probably got re-enabled and I never noticed because all the photos on all the pages were still linked to the old blog.

About a month ago I went through all the entries, and updated and compress each photo and link one at a time. Since no one but me really looks at my 10 year old entries, and Photon doesn’t upload right away, it wasn’t noticed. As near as I can figure, Photon doesn’t resize until it actually serves the image to a browser.

Lat month I went to the Seattle Zoo and uploaded a bunch of photos to an entry. I decided to use the WP Gallery feature. In the drop down, there was an option for tiled galleries. Having not used the gallery feature yet, and having recently converted the blog to GeneratePress premium, I had mistakenly assumed it was part of the new theme and related plug-ins.

I decided I really liked the look of the tiled galleries and started to move some of my other project photos over from Piwigo to WP where the format would actually work a bit better for a how to. It is then I noticed all the hundreds of “modified after compression” flags and started this whole mess.

After all the troubleshooting I think it took the rebuild-thumbnails plugin and the disconnection of Photon to clear the majority of them out. At the time I still didn’t realize that “Tiled-Galleries” was still linked to Photon regardless of preference.

So The one website mystery is solved. I’ll probably just leave the errors there since they do not seem to be harming anything.

The errors that have cropped up on the second website are still a mystery. I think it may be a good idea to start a new thread for that one to keep things separated. It has never had Photon, or tiled galleries, has the large size with the error instead of the medium, and also has “600×99999 Size is no longer in use” which has NEVER been on my site. So yeah, new thread when I get a few more moments.

Again, I thank you for all of your assistance!

Thank you. email being sent.

My thought on wp-jquery-lightbox was because it is/was common to both sites and has a resize to fit screen option. I had always assumed it was done with css but i didn’t want to rule it out.

I think I may have figured it out! Partly

I had a two fold problem that seems to have crept up since the last WP update.

The Jetpack Photon plugin was activated. I don’t know why or how probably likely by me in a sleep deprived stupor. This of course loads all the images to their CDN, why this gets changed and “modified” I haven’t a clue.

The other issue is that the Jetpack Tiled Galleries also uses their CDN. This apparently has been running on my site for a while. I had assumed that the Tiled galleries in the gallery drop down was part of the Generatepress theme because I hadn’t seen the option until I switched over. So why these were not showing as active until 4.5.1 maintenance release I haven’t a clue. Personally I’ll just blame HostGator ??

So, in a nutshell, it appears that the CDN offered by Jetpack is what is making it so that compressed images are still showing as modified after re-compressing. So that issue is solved.

The question now is, Why are they getting modified in the first place?

I have Two Tiled Galleries, one of which hasn’t even had any hits that registered on analytics yet still has some modified images.

I’ve also noticed on another site the same issue creeping up with modified files. This site does NOT have Photon nor Tiled Galleries but it does use wp-jquery-lightbox. Which I had had installed with no issues prior on both sites.

Was there maybe a change in WP 4.5 in the way it handles photo sizes?

I think it may possibly be the generatepress theme. when looking at the update made available today I saw this in the changelog:

Blog: Switch to a better image resizer

I’ll look into this.

“Do you notice any differences on the file system for these sizes?”
Yes. Using Aligator.jpg for an example File system shows:
Full size – 1.7MB 4/24/16
150×84 – 7.72kb 4/24/16
400×225 – 47.95kb 5/1/16
1024×576 – 147.7kb 4/30/16
TinyPNG Details tab shows compressed sizes of:
original – 1.7MB 1 week ago
Thumb – 7.7kb 1 week ago
medium (modified…) – 46.4kb 3 days ago
Large – 147.7kb 3 days ago

I now have clicked the compress button again on this file. It did it’s little panda magic thing and still has the “modified” notice.
The only change is that the file system has:
400×225 – 46.43kb Today at 5:18 pm
and TinyPNG has:
medium (modified…) – 46.4kb 1 min ago
So it’s obviously doing something.

So this morning I’ve gone through the Media directory again and there are now many more “modified” files. I cross referenced with Google Analytics and the photos are on pages that have had no traffic.

Is it possible that this is just because of wordpress 4.5 & HostGator’s out dated cURL?

I changed the medium thumbnail setting to 400 which better fits my page anyhow and then used Ajax_Thumbnail_Rebuild to rebuild the thumbnails. I then compressed all.

So far they have all actually responded and I have no “modified after compression” notices. At least as of 6:33AM PST ??

This isn’t a solutions, but it did make it so that I can at least see when a new file was changed. There were just too many that had the modified notice showing up.

Adding a new image will compress. Well it will compress as well as it can considering I’m on a host with an outdated cURL. So it isn’t that it is not compressing at all.

I’ve deactivated both Photon and wp-jquery-lightbox.

currently I have multiple files that are lingering with the “modified after compression” error. Most are on the “Medium” photo when I go into the details. That at least makes sense. Some also seem to have “medium_large … Size is no longer in use” (Which I do recall ever seeing, but I’ve had this blog for a number of years and that may be a holdout from an earlier version of wordpress?) If I compress these images, it looks like they are compressing, but the error remains and there is an increase in my compression count by one. So I would think that it’s compressing.

Is it possible that there is just a flag that is not getting updated and that the file is actually compressed after all?

Would it be worth it to maybe change medium size from 300 to say 450 (I’ve been thinking about this anyhow)un-tick Large since I really don’t use it, install re-build thumbnails or something similar? Maybe it’s a simple database corruption?

Trying to compress them isn’t doing anything now. the same files that have “modified after compression” still have it even after I chose compress all. Any thoughts?

Photon is disabled and something is still modifying images. Going to try disabling wp-jquery-lightbox again and see if it changes anything. It didn’t before, but maybe something with the WP update changed that.

The culprit appears to be the Jetpack Photon plugin. Not sure why that was even on, or when it turned on. I’ll re-compress and keep an eye on it to verify. It was definitely modifying files before loading the actual entry (visually at least)

So I narrowed down when it happens. If you are on a mobile device and visit a page that has the blog entry listed, such as search results, or the archive drop down it will “modify” the files. You don’t even have to load that particular entry, just the synopsis.

This may have just started with the recent wordpress update, but I cannot be sure.

I also still do not know if it’s a plug-in causing it, my theme (generatepress), or wordpress itself. More to come

I apparently spoke too soon. The “1 file modified after compression” has started creeping up again. Unfortunately I do not know when it started. sometime since last Saturday I think. I still do not have caching installed, but I have another plug in that I think is/or may also be causing the issue. I will look into it and report back

Six days later and the issue has not returned. So it looks like WP-Super cache is the culprit. The nice thing is that I really haven’t noticed any significant speed decrease with it turned off. I certainly am not going to complain about a 1 point drop with pagespeed, especially when I had a really large increase just by compressing the images.

I’ll disable it for a while, re-compress them all and keep an eye on it and report back.