Paul Butler.org

WordPress has a cool WYSIWIG editor that lets you easily resize images by dragging the corner around. The problem is that WordPress does not actually resize the image, it just tells the browser to display it smaller. This means that the full sized image is being sent to the browser, which makes the page load slower and take up more bandwidth. Additionally, most browsers are bad at resizing images, so the images look worse than if they were properly resized.

To get around this, I wrote a WordPress plugin called ImageScaler. I am still waiting for it to be approved by WordPress for hosting, so I have hosted it myself for now. It requires GD (almost all web hosts with PHP will have GD). It should work with PHP 4, but it has only been tested on PHP 5.

Here is an example of a scaled image (click it for the original):

Download ImageScaler 0.1

Update: the plugin is now hosted by WordPress.