Image Size Analysis: Exclude External Images

[bobmatyas]

Impacted plugin

Boost

Quick summary

Image Size Analysis makes recommendations for external images included via widgets, but the user doesn't control over the size of those images.

This results in a number of recommendations that can't be acted on. Additionally, Site Accelerator doesn't resize the images.

Steps to reproduce

1. Use a widget (Jetpack Display Remote Posts) to import blog posts from a third-party site
2. Run Image Size Analysis
3. Observe numerous recommendations for image adjustments that can't be made

A clear and concise description of what you expected to happen.

I would expect that we either exclude external images or indicate that they can't be optimized because they are external images.

I also would have expected Site Accelerator to present these at appropriately sized dimensions

What actually happened

External Images Being Loaded:

Results in Image Size Analysis:

Impact

Some (< 50%)

Available workarounds?

No but the platform is still usable

Platform (Simple and/or Atomic)

Self-hosted

Logs or notes

No response

[thingalon]

@pyronaur - I would love your thoughts on this. It seems like a quick thing to fix but I want to double-check that the recommended solution is the right approach here first.

[pyronaur]

We can't really differentiate between external images that can or can't be optimized. We probably can't run any auto-fixers or Jetpack CDN to fix them, but we should still let the user know that they're wrecking the performance.

Off the top of my head - a common situation here might be where the user is using some CDN plugin that hosts the images on a different domain.

Sometimes they might not have control, but sometimes they might. Instead of removing, I think this is a point we have to consider through the design of the dashboard.

[bobmatyas]

Yes, I think handling via better design in the dashboard would be a good fix here. I only considered direct imports from third-party sites, not the CDN use case.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been marked as stale. This happened because:

• It has been inactive for the past 6 months.
• It hasn’t been labeled `[Pri] BLOCKER`, `[Pri] High`, `[Type] Feature Request`, `[Type] Enhancement`, `[Type] Janitorial`, `Good For Community`, `[Type] Good First Bug`, etc.

No further action is needed. But it's worth checking if this ticket has clear reproduction steps and it is still reproducible. Feel free to close this issue if you think it's not valid anymore — if you do, please add a brief explanation.