Can I stop wordpress generating media sizes

Question

I am using atelier theme on a shop website and I have seen the disk space grow rapidly. In my analysis, I have noticed that Atelier is creating 17 different media sizes when it uploads an image:

    thumbnail - 150x150
    medium - 300x300
    medium_large - 768x9999
    large - 1024x1024
    shop_thumbnail - 180x180
    shop_catalog - 800x800
    shop_single - 600x600
    post-thumbnail - 220x150
    widget-image - 94x70
    thumb-square - 250x250
    thumb-image - 600x450
    thumb-image-twocol - 900x675
    thumb-image-onecol - 1800x1200
    blog-image - 1280x9999
    gallery-image - 1000x9999
    large-square - 1200x1200
    full-width-image-gallery - 1280x720

This seems to be a little bit of overkill to me especially when uploading a batch of images sometimes results in memory overload = Error 500.

Not only is it now consuming GBs of space but there are 1000's and 1000's of files...

What happens if I do remove some of these media sizes? Will the website lose reference and display an missing image OR will it simple use an alternate size?

And also, is there a simple way to unlink and delete all the additional images size I no longer want?

Answer 1

You can use remove_image_size() to remove previously registered image sizes.

Ex : <?php remove_image_size('full-width-image-gallery'); ?>

Note: Cannot be used on reserved image size names