Title: Plugin serving excessively large images
Last modified: January 29, 2019

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# Plugin serving excessively large images

 *  Resolved [cag8f](https://wordpress.org/support/users/cag8f/)
 * (@cag8f)
 * [7 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-serving-excessively-large-images/)
 * Hello. I’ve used your plugin to add an Instagram feed to my page. I am now trying
   to improve the performance of my site. Several performance testers (e.g. Google
   PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix) indicate that the thumbnails displayed in my Instagram
   feed are unnecessarily large ([screenshot](https://imgur.com/7NbOcqR)). Specifically,
   your plugin seems to be fetching and serving images of size 1080 x 1080, then
   re-sizing them down to 201 x 201. Is there any way to resolve or improve this?
 * Thanks.
 * The page I need help with: _[[log in](https://login.wordpress.org/?redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Fwordpress.org%2Fsupport%2Ftopic%2Fplugin-serving-excessively-large-images%2F%3Foutput_format%3Dmd&locale=en_US)
   to see the link]_

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

 *  Plugin Author [Sayontan Sinha](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sayontan/)
 * (@sayontan)
 * [7 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-serving-excessively-large-images/#post-11144379)
 * Since Instagram’s images are much lower resolution and smaller than those of 
   other providers (and since for the most part the images are square), unlike Google
   Photos or SmugMug there is currently no provision to set a “tile size” for the
   Justified Grid, Masonry and Mosaic layouts.
 * Note that Instagram only gives standard a few standard sizes – thumbnail (150px),
   low resolution (306px or 320px), standard resolution (612px or 640px), and the
   1080px. Any image you pull will be resized from the size immediately bigger. 
   Photonic will scale up a smaller image in very rare cases, and will prefer to
   scale down a bigger image. This is to avoid pixelation of the photos.
 * Also note that Photonic’s scaling is always via CSS since it is never hosting
   your images – true scaling without CSS requires the scaling to happen on the 
   _server side_, not the browser. Google Photos and SmugMug can do this for any
   of the images they host, as can Jetpack for WP-hosted images. Instagram most 
   certainly cannot support server side scaling, so the scaling will always happen
   on the browser.
 * That being said, on your page you don’t really need to pull the full-size images
   using the Masonry layout – you could have done just as well with the square thumbnails,
   setting a size of 200 for the thumbnail. This would have made Photonic pull the“
   low resolution” photo (320px large) and scale it to 200px. Your main image could
   still point to the 1080px photo and that is what would show up in a lightbox.
   This way the larger images will only be requested if the lightbox is clicked.
 *  Thread Starter [cag8f](https://wordpress.org/support/users/cag8f/)
 * (@cag8f)
 * [7 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-serving-excessively-large-images/#post-11144740)
 * OK thanks for the clarification on that–I appreciate it.
 * >> That being said, on your page you don’t really need to pull the full-size 
   images using the Masonry layout – you could have done just as well with the square
   thumbnails, setting a size of 200 for the thumbnail. This would have made Photonic
   pull the “low resolution” photo (320px large) and scale it to 200px. Your main
   image could still point to the 1080px photo and that is what would show up in
   a lightbox. This way the larger images will only be requested if the lightbox
   is clicked.
 * OK I am indeed interested in trying this out. In my shortcode, I changed the 
   layout from ‘masonry’ to ‘square.’ But how do I set the thumbnails to size 200?
 *  Plugin Author [Sayontan Sinha](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sayontan/)
 * (@sayontan)
 * [7 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-serving-excessively-large-images/#post-11144781)
 * If you are using the “Add / Edit Photonic Gallery” button you will see the option
   in the shortcode builder after you select the square thumbnail layout.
 * I believe the technical name of the attribute is called `thumb_size` in case 
   you are building the shortcode by hand.
 *  Thread Starter [cag8f](https://wordpress.org/support/users/cag8f/)
 * (@cag8f)
 * [7 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-serving-excessively-large-images/#post-11144831)
 * OK cool, that all worked. Thanks very much for that. We can consider this resolved.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

The topic ‘Plugin serving excessively large images’ is closed to new replies.

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 * 4 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [cag8f](https://wordpress.org/support/users/cag8f/)
 * Last activity: [7 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-serving-excessively-large-images/#post-11144831)
 * Status: resolved