Pictures taken with mobile phones or digital cameras are often too big to easily upload to WordPress and you might have storage limits to consider. It’s good practice to shrink images to below 1MB. It’s not just to look after your space, but also to be considerate to your website visitors: to download large pictures takes both time and bandwidth.

This article describes two methods for shrinking images: editing them in WordPress (not the .com hosting site, but the self-hosted software), or using Paint on Windows.

Shrinking images in WordPress

If you have uploaded a large image to WordPress, you can edit it online to shrink it.

These instructions work with WordPress 4.2.x.

1. Log in to WordPress.
2. Click Media and then Library.
   This opens the Media Library.
3. Click the image you want to edit.
   This opens the Attachment Details for the image. Here, you can see how large the image is, both in file size and dimensions. Typically, images should not be wider than the standard page on your website.
4. Click Edit Image.
5. To shrink an image: In the Scale Image section, enter a new width, or height. (WordPress automatically calculates the other dimension’s new size.)
6. Click Scale.
7. Close Attachment Details.

Shrinking images in Paint

Paint is an image manipulation and painting program that comes as default with Windows. It has limited editing features but can be used to resize and crop images.

The instructions assumes that you’re comfortable with opening files in Windows applications.

These instructions work with Paint 6.1.

1. In Paint, open the image you want to shrink.
2. Click Home.
3. Click Resize.
   The Resize and Skew dialog is displayed.
4. In the Resize section, select whether you want to resize by percentage or exact pixels.
5. Enter the horizontal or vertical size.
   Ensure that Maintain aspect ratio is selected so you only need to enter one value.
6. Click OK.
7. Save the image with a new name to keep the original untouched.