8th June 2020 – Online via Zoom
The Coronavirus pandemic has caused a lot of disruption and chaos to businesses and people’s way of life in 2020. Seeing friends, family and work colleagues in person has been replaced with Zoom and WhatsApp calls. Normally, WordPress meetups take-place in a set room, but as with meetings of late, this one took place via Zoom.
I have to admit, this was my first Cambridge meetup, mainly because travelling to Cambridge is a bit of a trek for me, especially during a weeknight.
This months presentation was discussed images for WordPress, and it was presented by Chris Cox.
The main points from the presentation that I found were:
- The image format WebP. This is a modern image format, developed by Google. It uses a far superior lossy and lossless file compression technique compared to both PNG and JPEG, meaning smaller file sizes and potentially faster web page load speeds. Learn more here https://developers.google.com/speed/webp
- There are many image hosting sites that offer free downloadable images such as Unsplash, Pexels, Rijks Museum, LottieFiles, Canva, UnDraw, The Noun Project -Some of these are new to me, some aren’t
- For those unaware, there are a few good image editing applications – great for resizing, compressing and creating logos etc with – Canva, PhotoShop and PhotoShop Element, Gimp, Paint and Paint.Net
- There are plugins that can aid image compression and file size. One that was discussed a lot was Short Pixel – https://shortpixel.com/
- A plugin called Media Library Assistant –https://wordpress.org/plugins/media-library-assistant/ This create categories, taxonomies, shortcodes and other custom fields for your images
- Another plugin created by the same team that created Short Pixel, Enable Media Replace – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/enable-media-replace/ Useful for finding and replacing images, without the need for renaming and deleting
