Last month I was optimising a blog with a very common problem. The site had been accumulating images (+40K) for many years without control. They were all poorly or not at all optimised. Many of them had been uploaded in sizes with absolutely disproportionate weights and many others were no longer in use.
In the long run, this causes several problems. The first is that it significantly increases the size of the database as well as slowing down the loading speed. The weight of the images also eats up the available space on the hosting and we can run out of space or even exceed the number of inodes allowed by the hosting.
The first thing I had to do was to find out the amount and weight of the total images. This plugin helped me in part.
The Export Media URLs plugin is one of those "throwaway" plugins that is as simple as it is easy to use. As its name suggests, it serves only one purpose: it exports a list of all the images(actually media, so it also includes PDFs and others) that we have uploaded to our WordPress. Which can help us in case of migration, SEO analysis, optimisation or security audits.
On opening it, we find a single screen with these options.
If we choose the .CSV option, the plugin generates the list in a file with a random number for security. It is advisable to download it(1) and delete the copy that remains on the server, as advised after generating it(2).
In this list we can extract the ID, title, file name, caption, alternative text, description, URL, upload date and type.
The only drawback I find is that it lacks a"Size" option to know the weight of each image. With this, the plugin would have been great. This would save us having to go to the file manager or use other tools to know the weight of each image or different sets.
We can export the list in a .CSV file or choose to show them inside the plugin's own administration area ("Output here") although if there are a lot of images it is not advisable as I have not yet discovered where to place the file in this case.
It works really fast, a test list with 15842 images in .CSV was created in just under two minutes with a final weight of just 1.4 MB.
This is how the list is displayed if we choose to create it within the plugin.
The minimum requirements to be able to use it are minimal, WordPress 3.1.0 or higher under PHP 5.4 or higher.
