Getting started

What you need

Install the plugin

In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins, then Add New Plugin. Search for ImgCrisp, choose Install Now, then Activate.

ImgCrisp adds its own menu, just below Media. It has five screens: Bulk Optimize, Image Scanner, Upscale, Optimization Report and Settings. Activating the plugin changes nothing on its own: no image is touched until you save an API key and either start Bulk Optimize or switch on automatic optimization of new uploads.

Connect your API key

  1. Go to ImgCrisp, then Settings.
  2. In the Service & connection panel, paste your key into API key.
  3. Press Save changes.

Then press Check now in the Service health panel. Connection should read Connected, and API key should read Valid. If the key reads Invalid, paste it again: a missing or wrong key makes images show as Skipped instead of being optimized.

Optimize your library

Go to ImgCrisp, then Bulk Optimize, and press Start. The screen lists your images, then hands them to a background queue that works through them one at a time. Keep the page open until the count of images to process stops climbing; after that the queue carries on by itself.

While it runs you can press Pause and pick up later with Resume, or Stop, which keeps everything already optimized. The status cards show how many images are optimized, pending, failed and skipped.

Before any change, ImgCrisp copies each original into a backup folder, so every image can be restored. See Restoring an image.

New uploads

New uploads are left alone until you switch on Optimize new uploads automatically in the Behavior panel of Settings. With it on, each new image is optimized as it is uploaded, after WordPress has made its sizes, and if that first try fails, the next Bulk Optimize run picks it up. With it off, Bulk Optimize picks up new images whenever you run it.

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