It appears that GTMetrix only does lossless comparison (unlike some sites that recommend lossy compression). One thing many people miss is that images can have metadata attached to them, and GTMetrix does expect that to be stripped.
This feature is turned OFF by default in EWWW IO, because some folks (like photographers) don’t want it stripped, and once it’s removed, it is gone forever (unless of course you have backups, which you should).
Thread Starter
F
(@cfryburger)
Thank you for the reply. Yes, I’m stripping metadata with EWWW (local version).
My question is if GTMetrix does lossless compression and EWWW does lossless compression, why are GTMetrix’s images significantly smaller? JPGs, for example, are 10-25% less.
Another way of saying it is that GTMetrix is only rating EWWW compressed images as an overall “C”.
Thanks again!
I understand what you’re saying, but something is missing here if you’ve got metadata stripping turned on, and gtmetrix is saying you could have smaller files. Please post a link to the page/site you are scanning with gtmetrix.
Thread Starter
F
(@cfryburger)
Thank you. The site is http://www.sunriseadvertising.com
NOTE: I pulled some of the more grievous images down and optimized then, re-uploaded, but you can still see that several images are larger than they should be. Everything has been run thru EWWW twice.
Thanks again,
Chris
Well, from a quick look, you can run the ‘Scan & Optimize’ on the bulk optimize page and that will take care of the theme images.
The images in the /uploads/ folder are a bit of a mystery. I’m wondering if they are the ‘originals’ from attachments that have been edited within WordPress. Currently, the plugin has no detection for originals that might be stored after an edit, and it is entirely possible for these originals to be used in posts/pages prior to the edit being made.
You might try turning on the debugging option on the plugin settings page, and then look at the images in question on the Media Library page, where it will show the attachment metadata with a yellow background. This will allow you to see the filenames of the actual images. If you see something like myimage-e1397003923600.jpg, that means it has been edited in WP.
Thread Starter
F
(@cfryburger)
Thanks for your efforts. I don’t show any images with that added string in my media library. Note that I’ve also tried Smush.it on these images, in bulk, and they still appear bigger than GTMetrix recommends.
I’ll just replace all the images with the GTMetrix equivalent and go from there.
Note that in no way am I implying your plugin is not GREAT (it is and thank you), but this issue was just bugging me.
Thanks again!
Thread Starter
F
(@cfryburger)
I’ll just close this now.
