The answer to that is generally “no”. None of the compression/conversion will be undone. But if you’re using our lazy load or WebP delivery, that will stop when you uninstall the plugin.
Thread Starter
Deon
(@deon-b)
Hi,
I was thinking that you compress and convert the images and they are added to the media library and changed inside the blog posts. And that if I delete the plugin, the blog posts goes back to picking up the old original images.
So if I understand from your answer the original images are not kept but swapped for the new compressed+converted ones. And the process is irreversible.
Did I get it correctly?
With converted images (PNG to JPG, PNG to JPG, and GIF to PNG), we do keep the originals on disk in case of broken links, unless you enable the Delete Originals option. There is a tool under Tools->EWWW Image Optimizer to clean those up retroactively.
As for posts that might have the old link, we update anything within the wp_posts table (post_content column), and those changes are indeed irreversible.
Now, if you’re talking WebP conversion, that’s all dynamic. That is, URL rewriting is done “on the fly”, and if you disable EWWW IO, the rewriting stops.
Thread Starter
Deon
(@deon-b)
Hi,
a bit late with my reply, but could you please clarify what you mean with this:
As for posts that might have the old link, we update anything within the wp_posts table (post_content column), and those changes are indeed irreversible.
You mean some posts (for random reason?) will not automatically point to the new image and in this case they will still point to the original one?
And another question, so after I compress all images, I could potentially uninstall the plugin and keep the compressed images?
Thank you
Indeed, there are cases, mostly with page builders, where the image URL is stored in some random location that a developer thought would be better than the standard wp_posts table. In such cases, EWWW IO cannot update the image URL to the new image, and it will still point to the old one. If you only ever use the standard editor(s) (block or classic), then you should be just fine.
All compression/conversion done in free mode will be retained even if you remove the plugin. Our (paid) Easy IO CDN service is the only portion of the plugin where image compression/conversion is done on *copies* of the images, and not to the *local* versions on your server.
