I needed a WordPress plugin that would bridge the gap between Live Writer and the WordPress post editor, I use Lightshot to cut segments of my screen for images very frequently so the ability to copy and paste images into my WordPress Editor was critical if I wanted to use the WordPress Post Editor instead of Live Writer which I had become more increasingly frustrated with since the 2012 version and the lack of apparent Microsoft support going forward. Well the Image Elevator Premium WordPress plugin solves the problem and in addition also allows for image compression and automatic re-sizing of images that you copy and paste directly into your WordPress editor from your clip board.
Here is my video showing how OptiPress Image Elevator works for WordPress
Once you download and install the plugin, which costs $13 for a single site license you will see a new little icon in your Post Editor. Clicking on it will let you set the default options for the plugin including pasting images with links, image resizing so you can make sure they automatically either shrink to fit within your post window, or auto-crop to fit within your post window (mostly you will want to resize and not have cropping except in some cases). You can also have it save original images too instead of the resized cropped ones, if you want the original to expand as well as my favorite which is convert image to JPG and compress the image. You can set it to compress any image that is larger than default of 400kb, but honestly I would set it to 100kb or even 50k so that it compresses as much as possible, you can also set the threshold on how much to compress image quality wise (80% is the default and pretty good, but if you find that it reduces image quality too much you can try 90%).
With the default 80% compression you get amazing shrinkage of the image file size and very little quality degradation from what I can detect. For example, this image below in it’s original quality is 441×399 and has a file size of 267kb.
That same exact image re-pasted with compression set to 80% yielded an image file size of only 28kb which is nearly 1/10th the file size and greatly improves pageload times if you have a post with multiple images.
The image loss is very slight in my opinion and unless you run a photography blog or have extremely high resolution images for a reason, I think the file size savings is worth it.
Image Elevator does have some caveats that I wanted to point out, and one is that it is slow cutting and pasting an image when you have compression enabled, it does take time, sometimes 4-5 seconds for that image to finish compressing, uploading and then paste into the post editor. It is much faster if you aren’t doing compression, but just know you get that little clocking wheel while you are waiting for it to compress and upload the image.
It isn’t too bad though, and sometimes it goes faster and other times slower.
You can also quickly rename images too, there is the image name at the bottom right of the image while it is visible in the post editor.
If you click on it, a popup comes up with the ability to rename the image, it even gives suggestions based on category of the post but unfortunately you would have had to select a post category it would seem before the auto suggestion works. Right now the plugin doesn’t add html tags like title and alt to SEO optimize the image, but the developer said this is a feature coming in the near future. I also recommended the add nofollow to the link and open in a new window or tab so when link is clicked on it won’t replace the current browsing window.
Other than that the plugin is pretty fantastic, though it does appear to cause some post editor slowness only when copying images. I did P3 Performance profiler and ran auto and manual scans and I could find no evidence that the plugin caused any performance impact to loading any pages or administrative pages. The plugin didn’t even register as loading and taking up any performance no matter how many times I triggered in post editor.
So overall I was super impressed and have to say that if you were looking for a way to copy images from your clipboard or just simply instantly copy image files from your desktop right into your post editor faster than clicking “add media” then Image Elevator for WordPress is the plugin that will get the job done. It also does a fine job compressing images so saves you time and having to manually compress images in an image editor before you upload them. My only complaint is that the $13 for the plugin only buys a single DNS name site license, you can’t use the plugin for more than 1 site without purchasing 1 license per site. I have 7 blogs and want to use this on at least 5 of them, but it becomes very expensive to have to purchase the license that many times. Though the $65 extended license lets you use it on unlimited sites that you own and are your personal sites, this doesn’t include using it for client/customer sites that you resell. I personally think this plugin should be much cheaper for unlimited personal site license, should be about $30 as the price point I think worth the ROI for unlimited personal license. The $65 license cost should be including the ability to deploy it to client sites. But, I suggest buying the $65 extended license instead of the $13 single license only if you have more than 3 personal blogs and you absolutely want to have the customizations that come with the premium and image compression. One note, is that you can de-register a site anytime and then add your single license to another site, so to do my initial review I tied the license to my Poetry blog for testing, then I de-registered it and re-registered it to DragonBlogger.com it only takes like 3 minutes to transfer the plugin license from one site to another which is a plus.