WordPress 6.3 and Featured Image Resize Problem

[ungowp]

Hello,

After installing WordPress 6.3, we realized that we have an important problem. The images we upload as Featured are cropping. This can seriously affect our site traffic. How can we prevent this from happening? Our featured images are all high resolution, but they appear as 1200px in Google results.

We have been using add_filter( 'big_image_size_threshold', '__return_false' ); since day one. Also in media settings all resolution values are set to 0px. But despite this, after WP 6.3, all our images started to be indexed as 1200px.

An image that is normally 3000px is now indexed at 1200px: ​https://ibb.co/YyrRKwV

[ungowp]

Wordpress 6.3 crops featured images when we don't want it to. This is a very big problem.

Another image uploaded as 1800px was rebuilt as 1200px and indexed as such: ​https://ibb.co/0jhYN85

[desrosj]

Hi @ungowp,

Welcome to Trac! I'm sorry that it took so long to receive a response.

When an image is uploaded to WordPress, there are a number of image sizes generated. The total number depends on how many sub sizes are registered by any active plugins and your theme. By default, WordPress will create a smaller image from the original when one side is greater than 2560 pixels before using that version to create any further images. The only thing that the big_image_size_threshold filter you mentioned controls is disabling this behavior to ensure all images are generated from the true, full size original.

The reason why a smaller size is being indexed for your images is really hard to say without being able to look at the site, and could be due a large number of variables. Given the information available right now, it does not seem like this is a bug in WordPress Core, so I'm going to close this out.

If you're able to pinpoint steps to reproduce this in a fresh install of WordPress, please reopen the ticket with more detail.