Flying Pigs Uploader

Description

Which of the many WordPress image optimizers should you use for new images? None.

Let the pigs do the work before your images ever land on your server. Flying Pigs makes every size, every WebP and every AVIF in your browser, optimizes the original, and only then uploads. Your server just writes the files. From the day you install it, nothing arrives that still needs work.

Find it under Media → Flying Pigs Uploader.

Why it is faster

• Your server does no image work. WordPress normally resizes every photo on the server, one at a time, and an optimizer plugin then does it all again. Here your computer does it once, before the upload.
• Finished on arrival. No background queue, no “optimizing…” status, no first visitor waiting on a thumbnail. Each file is final the moment it lands.
• Built for bulk. Hundreds of photos travel in a few large requests instead of one request per file, which keeps a shared host’s rate limits out of the way.

Measured, not promised

221 photos (209 MB), the same files on the same day, WebP-only output over HTTP/2, lean installs with no other plugin hooking uploads:

• A managed host. WordPress Media page: 12 min 20 s. Flying Pigs Free: 2 min 19 s.
• A budget LiteSpeed host. WordPress Media page: 15 min 47 s. Flying Pigs Free: 4 min 23 s.
• A large shared host, its optimizer off. WordPress Media page: 20 min 5 s. Flying Pigs Free: 11 min 8 s.

From nearly twice as fast to more than five times as fast, depending on the host, with the server doing none of the image work.

Everything an upload needs is free

• Every size made in your browser, for every size your theme and plugins register. Pick which ones to make in the Sizes panel.
• Optimized originals. Auto rotated, metadata removed and much smaller at the same dimensions (about 60% on our test photos), with colors converted to sRGB so they look right everywhere. PNG to JPG is a click away.
• WebP and AVIF built in, for the original and every size, with quality and effort per format. A copy that comes out larger than the original is discarded.
• Delivery set up for you. The Delivery panel tests your server and turns WebP and AVIF delivery on, or leaves it to the delivery plugin you already use.
• State your AI-training rights in every image. Every file carries the standard IPTC rights statement, “No AI training, allow search indexing” by default.
• Straight into your folders. Pick a FileBird, Real Media Library, CatFolders, Mediamatic, Filorium, Folders by Premio, Wicked Folders or HappyFiles folder, and the whole run lands in it.
• Not limited by your host’s upload limit. Large files are sent in chunks that fit under it.
• Uploads that do not give up. Failed requests are retried, and a run survives a dropped connection or an expired login.
• Gentle on shared hosting. Optional limits on upload rate, batch size and pauses.
• A progress window you can pop out, with speed, files per second and any failed files listed as they happen.

No file limit, no monthly quota, no account. Your files go to your own site and nowhere else.

Who it is for

• Store owners loading a catalog of product photos.
• Photographers and bloggers who upload big batches straight from the camera.
• Agencies and site builders loading or migrating large media libraries for clients.
• Anyone on shared hosting, where every second of server time counts.

Flying Pigs Pro

Pro adds power tools for big libraries and product catalogs:

• Resize before upload, 2560×2560 by default, so a 6,000-pixel camera file never reaches your server.
• WebP only. Store the WebP and nothing else: half the files, and browsers get WebP with no delivery setup.
• Watermark, with a built-in text and logo maker.
• Turbo boost, up to six upload lanes, with a link check that sizes them to your line and host.
• Overwrite in place. Replace a photo at the same address, with page builder, gallery and cache references repaired.
• File date and post date. File uploads by the photo’s own date, or one you choose.
• WooCommerce product photos by SKU or name. Name the files for a product’s SKU or name plus a number (SKU-0.jpg, SKU-1.jpg …, or “Name (1).jpg” as File Explorer numbers them; Finder and File Explorer rename a folder this way in one pass), and they attach to the matching products as they upload, with no second image-import pass.
• Updates through your Plugins screen, and the help desk.

The free plugin shows each Pro control in place, badged PRO, and carries none of the Pro code. See flying-pigs.wpspeedmeup.com for Pro.

Requirements

• A browser with WebAssembly threads: Chrome, Edge, Brave, Safari 16.4 or later, and Firefox all run the engine. iPad and iPhone browsers usually refuse the engine’s memory and work in fallback mode (see the FAQ).
• HTTPS (or localhost). The engine needs SharedArrayBuffer, which browsers enable only in a secure, cross-origin-isolated page. Without it the page falls back to classic uploads with server-side thumbnails and says so in its header.
• No web-server configuration. The page fetches the engine’s files once and starts every worker from them, so they need no special headers or MIME types on Apache, LiteSpeed or nginx.
• No PHP limits to raise. Batches are capped at 25 MB, or 90% of the host’s upload limit when that is lower; a larger file is sent in chunks.

External services

None. Flying Pigs Free makes no call to any outside service: the image work happens in your browser and the uploads go to this site’s own REST API. Nothing is sent anywhere else, and nothing is collected. (The Pro version has a link check, a speed test against Cloudflare’s speed-test endpoint that runs when its button is pressed; the free plugin carries none of that code.)

Source code

The image engine is wasm-vips, libvips compiled to WebAssembly by Kleis Auke Wolthuizen (MIT), from https://github.com/kleisauke/wasm-vips. The files under vendor/wasm-vips (vips-es6.js, vips.wasm and vips-heif.wasm) are that project’s published npm release 0.0.18, unmodified; vendor/wasm-vips/SOURCE.txt records the release, the SHA-256 of each file, and the build instructions. The two .wasm files are the engine itself: every size, WebP and AVIF file is made by them in the browser, and they are served from your own site because the plugin loads no code from anywhere else. The plugin’s own worker, vendor/wasm-vips/fpig-vips-worker.js, and everything else in the plugin are plain source.

Fonts: DSEG (SIL OFL 1.1) for the run timer and Fredoka (SIL OFL 1.1) for the wordmark, both under vendor/ with their licenses.

Technical details