Lossy Image Compression Now Available

Today we’re introducing a new feature enabling you to optionally compress images on your sites with greater control over quality and file size.

On WordPress.com VIP, we’ve always losslessly compressed your uploaded images—we do some simple processing to trim file sizes and remove bloat while still maintaining the original images’ quality.

However, as we continue to see traffic across the VIP network shift to mobile devices, in an interest to help our publishers reduce page load times we’ve now added options to further optimize file sizes through lossy compression.

Implementation is really straightforward, using this function in your theme (make sure to refer to the canonical documentation, as this may change over time):

wpcom_vip_set_image_quality( $quality, $strip )

$quality can be a value between 0 and 100, where 100 is the original image quality.

$strip refers to meta data embedded in the file, and has the following options:

– info: will remove all Exif, IPTC and comment data from the image.
– color: will remove any ICC color profiles present in the image.
– all: will remove all of the above.

For example, our annual WordPress-themed holiday wallpaper:

At full size, this image is 649k; with strip=all it’s reduced down to 600k, and with quality=80 it shrinks even further to 125k—with only a marginal impact to image quality:

Special thanks to our friends at TechCrunch for helping test this new feature!