Everytime you add a picture to your media library, WordPress, by default, creates three copies of that picture together with thumbnail, medium and enormous variations. Some themes or plugins can also create extra picture sizes, and by modifying your theme capabilities file, you possibly can even specify extra sizes apart from the three default ones. Nevertheless, having a number of totally different sized variations of your photographs takes up much more area in your Webhosting server, and it additionally makes your WordPress backups a lot bigger and extra time-consuming to create, notably in case you have a big database of photographs. Because of this, you could wish to stop WordPress from creating extra picture sizes which you haven’t any use for. This information explains how you can obtain this in just some minutes.

1. If you’re unsure what number of extra photographs WordPress is at present creating while you add a brand new picture to the media library, you possibly can shortly discover out by logging into your FTP server and navigating to /wp-content/uploads to view the picture copies created by WordPress. On this listing, you will notice the names of your picture information adopted by the size. Learn how many copies of the identical picture there are.
2. In your WordPress administrator dashboard, navigate to Settings > Media. Setting the sizes to Zero will stop WordPress from creating extra photographs. It’s sensible to depart the thumbnail dimension setting intact (or cut back it as required) reasonably than use 0, since doing so will trigger show issues along with your WordPress media gallery. Click on “Save Adjustments” to proceed.
3. In case your present theme is creating extra picture sizes, you will have to edit the related traces of code within the capabilities.php file of your at present energetic theme. To do that, navigate to Look > Editor and click on on “capabilities.php” within the right-side column. Scroll down the web page of code to seek out any traces beginning with the “add_image_size” operator, and edit or take away them as required. Eradicating them will stop your energetic theme from creating extra copies of your uploaded photographs.