Marla here! I hope everyone has had a wonderful Christmas, eaten far too much and managed to stay clear of any family drama.
We’ve run into a bit of an issue with media storage on our WP account. Simply put, we’re running out of included storage and currently sit at less than 20% available left with the Premium plan.
Hindsight, that delightful pain in my side, tells me that we should have decreased the image size from the very beginning. Of course, this wasn’t thought of so here we are. #sigh But we have done this now to automatically shrink future uploads.
I should mention that we don’t want to pay more for the Business plan to increase storage further (this is supposed to just be a bit of fun, not a pricey endeavour, after all). And we pay for a domain on top of the (not cheap) Premium plan. $$$
I have already reached out to WP and there doesn’t seem to be an option of shrinking pre-existing media. Basically, what’s done is done.
So what can we do moving forward?
Do we painstakingly upload smaller image sizes and replace/delete the larger images from previous posts? This exhausts me just thinking about it.
Do we delete most of our posts and associated media and keep only those that we love?
Do we delete everything and just start again?
Do we limit posts to our single photo Friday posts?
Do I throw my Chromebook at a wall and hide in a blanket fort of oblivion?
I digress.. but that last one is appealing. 😋
But in all seriousness, there are so many posts and photos that we want to share but haven’t because we’ve felt stuck and not sure how to proceed.
So we ask (plead, really) for suggestions and advice from our fellow WP bloggers on what to do and how to move forward. Help!
Thank you in advance.
I had this issue before, I was using full size images and ran out of space. I did as you suggested, reduced all photos to 1000*667 pixels which made all photos less than 1mb. Then I changed them in each blog. Yes it was a pain in the ass.
Another option is to go self hosting, that way your site is backed up locally on your own computer. No need to worry about WordPress restrictions. But that comes with its own set of problems.
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Ugh. If we hadn’t invested so much time already, we’d probably just abandon this site and start afresh. I’m not tech-savvy enough to understand self-hosting so replacing every.damn.photo seems to be the only option. If anyone needs me I’ll be drowning myself with cheap wine and a flood of tears. 😭🍷
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I went self hosting through bluehost and they were quite helpful. Any queries I had they were happy to help. I had no idea what I was doing either. If you do, I’ll give you a heads up on the main difficulties I encountered.
I’ll admit it’s a pain either way. Good luck getting through it and the bottle of wine
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Thank you!
And surely you meant bottleS. 😋
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Hey guys, quite a dilemma!
I actually use Flicker to store all my photos.
Create a Flickr account and then upload your photos. Then copy and paste the share code into your blog posts.
Could be another option for you. 😉
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Thanks for the reminder. I have done that on occasion with Google albums. I think I’ll start doing that.. share a couple of photos in posts and a link to the rest of the album. I also have Flickr, which I completely forgot about. Thanks again!
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👍🏼😊
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Who knew? Thanks for flagging this issue which is clearly a biggie for people who post a lot of media. I guess it’s not an issue for me as I only have a fraction of my storage space used. Good advice, though, to resize the pics and it would be even better if WordPress automatically suggested it when uploading!
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Oops, and forgot to say — best of luck finding a workaround without too much of a hangover! 😩
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You can start another blog with a similar name under this one and not pay. That’s what I did 2 years ago. Go to your admin.
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I currently use the free version but planning to self-host in a few months thru bluehost as well. I’d re-think about storing photos on Flickr if you don’t have a premium plan as Flickr is limiting photo storage to 1000 photos for free users starting January which is a serious downgrade from the 1TB when I signed up many years ago. So I’d to download all my Flickr photos as they will be deleting all photos over a 1000 come January.
When your WP yearly plan is up for renewal, you should look into self-hosting.
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That’s really good to know re: Flickr. Thanks for the heads up!
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From the start, I re-sized my photos to 780 x 439 pixels, because that’s what my theme suggested, but after a while I learned that re-sizing and compressing are two different things. My photos were still taking up too much space, so I made a one-time payment to Imagify (about ten Euros, I think) and did their ‘bulk optimization’, which seems to have solved the problem.
(I’m self-hosting on SiteGround, so I don’t know if this would be possible in your situation.)
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You may not need to resize and replace ALL your photos, just enough to regain space. If you’re replacing 3MB files with 300k files it’ll add up fairly fast. In time you might want to replace them all, but you don’t have to do it all at once.
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Bit by bit does seem to be the best (less daunting) option. Thank you!
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