Can I offload product photos ONLY? Will thumbnail generation work as expected?
. asked 1 year ago
I'm having the usual performance problems caused by having over 100k products and multiple thumbnails of each (somewhere between 14 and 21 each - trying to reduce that number). My two biggest performance problems are load time and disk space. My questions are:
Can I use your plugin to offload ONLY the product photos and their thumbnails to another directory or server while keeping all of the other images that I use on the site in the default location on the site server?
I need to create staging copies for testing. Copying the product images is very impractical. Will this let me use a single set of all the product images for the production and staging copies of the site? (You may assume that only the production site will alter the images.)
- I'm currently using the Thumbpress plugin to regenerate thumbnails and to restrict which are generated. Can I expect it to work the same way with the product image files located elsewhere? Will there be a difference if the images are in a different directory on the same server vs. hosted on a different server?
If you need additional info, or if you have a better solution, please let me know.
Dave Hilditch Staff answered 1 year ago
Yes you can – External Images provides extra functionality to every post type, featured image, thumbnail, gallery (where supported by that post type) etc, but it does not force you to use it. (also products have an extra external images area for variation featured images and variation gallery images)
If you have a product or post which has a real uploaded featured image then External Images will not run its code.
So – all you need to do is configure your imports for products to load the image URLs into the external_image_url postmeta field and let External Images handle it all and do not alter your other post types – they can continue using uploaded images.
Dave H. Staff replied 1 year ago 2. Yes, if you have images hosted somewhere else it lets you use that single store of images
3. No – you will not be able to resize these external images – in fact, only the FULL size image is every used.
If you are worried about data usage, then wherever your images are stored – e.g. images.yourdomain.com – if you place a CDN like Cloudflare in front of your domain then you can have Cloudflare resize the images on-the-fly for whatever sized device and whatever CSS setting is configured for that image. This works incredibly well and shifts all image resizing jobs over to your CDN.
