Compressing/Scaling images in WordPress

Is batch processing an option?

[shallow]

I've used Page Speed Labs to get a report about my site. Two high priority items that need attention are Leverage browser caching and Serve scaled images.

My site is image intensive; couple of thousand.

I'll leave the caching up to my web developer, but is there a way in WordPress to automatically batch scale images and/or compress them a bit more.

I don't want to overdue it because images are an important part of my site. But I would like reduce their weight without significantly reducing their overall appearance.

Got a big job ahead of me if I have to do this one at a time. Using WordPress 3.1.2.

Thank you.

[ergophobe]

It should scale images automatically if you upload them via the Wordpress uploader. It doesn't have great flexibility on the jpg image quality, but it should resize and cache the various sizes.

[shallow]

Thank you ergophobe. Discussed the situation with my web developer today and he's going to try CSS Sprites, and a couple of other things to speed up the site.

If these work, they are much preferable to over compressing images and the resulting loss of quality visually.

I don't thoroughly understand CCS sprites, but they sound a little like image slicing I did years ago in Photoshop when I first published my site with FrontPage.

[rocknbil]

Can you do this manually?

Photoshop would make this a snap. Download your images to a directory, create a temp destination directory, run a batch action on it, check them all out, if it's all good, upload them to the original directory.

A *big deal* with a lot of WP themes I see are thumbnails, many themes/sites use the original huge image scaled down. This may take a different approach if this is the problem you're facing. It shouldn't be too bad though, you'd put your scaled down images in a directory of it's own on your server and point the requests to that directory instead of the full sized ones.