Images are the heaviest thing on most WordPress sites. Not plugins, not the theme — the photographs. A camera original dropped straight into the media library can be four megabytes on its own, and WordPress will faithfully generate half a dozen sized copies of it, every one of them starting from that same oversized source.
The fix has always been the same: sort the image out before it reaches the media library. The annoyance has also always been the same — that means leaving your site, uploading your file to a stranger’s server, waiting, downloading it back, and taking on faith that it gets deleted afterwards.
There is now a set of image tools on WPFolks that skips all of that. Eight of them, free, no account needed.
What is there
- CompressShrink JPG, PNG and WebP before upload, with a quality slider.
- ResizeExact dimensions, with presets for featured images, headers and thumbnails.
- ConvertJPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF in any direction.
- CropDrag a box, or lock it to the ratio a social card expects.
- Rotate & flipWith a live preview, for photos that arrive sideways.
- Favicon generatorOne square image in, the whole size set out.
- Image to Base64A data URI you can paste into CSS or a plugin.
- Strip EXIFRemove GPS, timestamps and camera data before publishing.
Nothing is uploaded. Not “deleted quickly” — not uploaded at all
This is the part worth being precise about, because it is the difference between these tools and the ones you have been using.
Most online image tools send your file to a server, process it there, and hand back a download link. Their privacy policy then promises deletion after an hour, or a day. That promise may well be kept — but your file still crossed the internet, still landed on a disk you do not control, and you are still trusting a cleanup job you cannot see.
There is no retention window here, because there is nothing to retain. Your images never leave your device.
These tools do the work inside your own browser, on your own machine. There is no upload step, no temporary copy, and nothing for anyone to delete afterwards. WPFolks does not receive your images, cannot see them, and stores nothing about them. Close the tab and the working copy is gone from memory.
You do not have to take that on trust either. Open any tool, disconnect from the internet, and it still works — because nothing needs the network.
Two useful side effects fall out of that. There is no file size limit, since there is no server ceiling to hit; the only constraint is your device’s memory. And a client’s unreleased screenshots stay exactly where they belong.
Built for WordPress specifically
Plenty of generic image tools already exist. These ones answer WordPress questions.
The resize presets are WordPress sizes — 1200 × 628 for a featured image, 1920 × 1080 for a full-width header, 150 × 150 for a thumbnail. The crop ratios include the 1.91:1 that Facebook, LinkedIn and X use for link previews, which is also roughly what most themes crop featured images to. The favicon generator produces the 512 × 512 WordPress asks for as a site icon, plus the Apple touch icon and the legacy sizes browsers still request.
The EXIF stripper is there for a reason that deserves saying plainly: WordPress does not remove metadata from the original file you upload. The resized copies it generates usually lose most of it, but the full-size original keeps everything — and that is the file linked from the media library. A photo taken on a phone carries coordinates accurate to a few metres. For anyone publishing photographs taken at home, that is worth knowing before the post goes out rather than after.
A few things worth knowing
- WebP is safe to use. WordPress has accepted WebP uploads since 5.8 and can generate WebP thumbnails since 6.1. AVIF landed in 6.5. No plugin required for either.
- Do not convert screenshots to JPEG. JPEG compression smears sharp edges, which is what screenshots are made of. WebP handles flat colour and crisp text far better at the same size.
- Resize before upload, then let WordPress do the rest. Scale down to the largest size your theme actually displays and let WordPress derive the smaller variants. It never scales an image up, so uploading something too small leaves you with a blurry header permanently.
What comes next
More tools are planned, and the list is open to influence. A redaction tool for blurring parts of a screenshot is the strongest candidate — anyone who has posted a wp-admin screenshot in a support thread has had the moment of realising a licence key was visible in it. An OG image generator and an SVG optimiser are close behind.
If a tool you reach for regularly is missing, say so on the roadmap. The tools that get built are the ones folks ask for.