Recropping images to fit your new theme

• If you have already been blogging and uploading images to your site, follow the instructions in this article to re-crop your images to fit your new EmPress theme.
• If you are a brand new blogger and have not uploaded any media to your site previously, you can skip these steps. Instead, be sure to check out our articles on how to assign a featured image to a post!

With your old theme, your blog feed and post pages were set to a particular width. Chances are, that width is not the same as your new EmPress theme. So, images need to be resized to fit the new theme.

Luckily, we’ve included an easy way for you to do this, using the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin (which we package with our themes). Use the instructions below to re-crop your media library images all at once. 

• Looking for instructions on how to re-crop a single featured image? Use the instructions in this Help Desk article.

HOW TO REGENERATE THUMBNAILS FOR YOUR THEME

1. Upon theme activation, you will be prompted to install the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. The notification will look similar to this, and will be located near the top of your Dashboard:

You can also download the plugin directly here.

2. Click Begin installing plugin to get started.

3. Beginning installation will take you to a page where you can install and activate the plugin. First, check the box next to the Regenerate Thumbnails title, then click Install. Here is a video showing you the above two steps in action:

4. Wait for the confirmation screen, then click Return to Required Plugins Installer. Underneath the Regenerate Thumbnails title, click the link to Activate. If successfully activated, a notification will appear atop the page. Here is this process in action:

5. You can now run the Regenerate Thumbnails process by going to Tools > Regenerate Thumbnails. 

6. A new screen will load giving you regeneration options. It looks like this:

Customizing these options

• First, we recommend leaving Skip regenerating existing correctly sized thumbnails (faster) checked off. You can opt to delete old thumbnail files that no longer fit your theme, but as noted, this may result in dead image links for some users, so we tend to leave this option unchecked.
• Next, choose whether you would like to regenerate thumbnails for all attachments (i.e., all images in your media library), or for featured images only. 
  • Generally, we recommend starting with featured images only especially if you have years worth of blog posts in your archives. Featured images are the most important images to regenerate sizes for, as they will appear on your Home Page and category/search archival pages. 

• NOTE: Be sure to review our Regenerate Thumbnails Troubleshooting guide below for more on slow resizing processes!

7. Once you click the blue Regenerate Thumbnails button of your choice, the process will begin to run, and look similar to this:

You may leave the process running in this window. To continue customizing, or working in another application, please open a separate browser window or tab. If you close the Regenerate Thumbnails window process as it runs, it will cancel the process.

NOTE: How long the process takes depends on three big factors:

• How many total images need to be resized
• How many different media sizes are included in your theme (for example, a more simple theme such as Archer has far fewer media sizes than a theme such as Hayes)
• The quality of your hosting plan. If you are already utilizing a lot of resources/storage with your plan, or if your server is particularly slow, the process may take longer. 

8. Once the process is completed, your selected images should be properly resized across your blog.

9. Something not look right? For images that still look too small or do not properly fill their image containers, this indicates that the image was uploaded at a dimension so small, it will not look good with the theme. That's because if image proportions are not large enough (especially for Retina displays), the quality will look so poor that the thumbnail regenerator will skip over them. For images that fall into this category, we recommend re-uploading a new, larger image in their place.

TROUBLESHOOTING REGENERATE THUMBNAILS

ISSUE: The process seems to stall out or never finish

Try opening your live site, holding down the shift key, and clicking the refresh button at the same time (this clear's the browser cache.) As you click around the site, if you notice your images have all resized, you're good to go. If the images haven't resized, the process may simply need more time. You may wish to cancel the process, and start running it again in the evening, so it can run overnight. This will be pertinent to bloggers with years worth of content.

ISSUE: The process has made the rest of your site run very slowly

This is an issue of hosting, unfortunately. If you have an inexpensive shared hosting plan, and were already reaching resource allocation limits on that plan, you may notice performance issues on your live site. This is especially true if you're running the process during the middle of the day, when lots of readers are visiting your site. You may wish to run the process overnight instead. Better yet, consider upgrading to a Managed WP hosting plan, which can better accommodate your resource needs.

ISSUE: The process seems to not resize images that are very old

While there's no hard and fast rule, generally speaking, if you have more than 1000+ posts, you may experience issues simply due to the sheer volume of images that need to be resized. Remember, resizing isn't just about each individual image — it's about re-cropping that single image to fit the multitude of media sizes available within your theme, so it looks good no matter where it feeds into. We recommend only resizing featured images if possible. You can also run the process a few times, and then regenerate featured images on individual posts as needed.

ISSUE: Process ran successfully, but some images still don't look right.

Seeing images that still look too small or do not properly fill their image containers indicates that the image was uploaded at a dimension so small, it will not look good with the theme. That's because if image proportions are not large enough (especially for Retina displays), the quality will look so poor that the thumbnail regenerator will skip over them. For images that fall into this category, we recommend re-uploading a new, larger image in their place.

For more on Regenerate Thumbnails within each theme and how to use it to resize feature images for posts, please read these Help Desk articles:

• I installed my theme and the images are all the wrong size or too small
• How to assign a featured image to a blog post