… actually, a series of funny things …
A couple of days ago I did as I often do. I stepped back from my hardships and tried to forget the problems by doing a bit of art. What I came up with was this kaleidoodle; I posted it on the Silver Canvas site.
The WordPress Embed block won’t show the image, but that is getting head of my story. Here is the creation:
You can tell that I was already confused and gloomy. I just put it aside, like many others. Earlier I decided it was worth sharing. My habit is to downsize images for the web to either 2400 or 1800 pixels wide. I picked the bigger size for this. WordPress accepts images with the bigger dimension of 2560 pixels or less without fuss. That’s why I use 2400. But this piece has a lot of tiny detail and so the file size turned out to be 5.46 MB, and that is above the default limit of 5 MB for uploads. I was not surprised when I got an error message saying it could not be uploaded. I prepared a 1800 pixel size and proceeded with that one. No objections came up. My surprise came when I set the “featured image” and saw two thumbnails of this work. Seems like the larger version had uploaded after all. So I looked at it in the Media Library. Here is what it showed:
I added the red arrow so you can see what was an even a bigger surprise. The image had uploaded but was downsized to 2312 pixels wide so the file size would be 5 MB – the default limit.
Now isn’t that special! Never before had this happened to me. I had no idea that this ever would happen.
Of course curiosity set in. I knew that WordPress always makes additional copies in different sizes. I try to tie its hands so there won’t be too many. I had to go and take a look at what it had done. Here comes another surprise.
This is the listing of the files on the website. You can see four files with “r18” in the filename. Those are the 1800 pixel versions, the original (forth one down} and the resized versions, 156, 1568, and 768 pixels wide. Don’t ask why WordPress did this, nobody really knows. You can also see four files with “r24” in the filenames. The original one is there, all 5.46 MB worth. So It really uploaded it. But also notice that there is no 2312 pixel wide version. Where is it? I did not pursue the question.
I went ahead with the post of the 1800 pixel sized kaleidoodle. It automatically created a post on my Facebook Ludwig.Gallery page. You can see it there. I shared that post to the Cafe Art group and the Peach Blossom Artists group. No problems. I tried to share it to my Facebook home page an got this:
Yep, Facebook decided I was spamming myself. As my friends know, I have been doing such sharing all along. Never before did I encounter any problems.
Maybe this just isn’t my day …