Free Up WordPress Storage: Offload Your Media Library to YourImageShare

Shared hosting plans fill up quietly. A few years of blog images, a handful of videos, and every image WordPress resizes into five or six extra copies, and one day the dashboard warns you that you are out of storage. The usual answers are to pay for a bigger plan, delete old media, or move everything to cloud storage you have to set up and pay for yourself. YourImageShare Media Offload is a free WordPress plugin that takes a simpler route: it moves your Media Library to YourImageShare and serves it from there, without changing how you use WordPress.

It is available now from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory, so you can install it from your dashboard like any other plugin.

What the plugin does

Once it is set up, you keep using the Media Library, Add Media, the block editor, featured images and galleries exactly as before. Behind the scenes:

• New uploads offload automatically. When you upload an image or video, the plugin sends it to YourImageShare.
• The local copies are deleted once the upload is confirmed: the file, every thumbnail size WordPress generated, and the full-size original WordPress keeps next to "-scaled" images. That is what actually frees up space.
• Every attachment URL points to the hosted file: posts, featured images, galleries, the block editor and the REST API, including images and videos you placed in posts before they were offloaded.
• Nothing is deleted until the upload succeeds. If an upload fails, the local file stays exactly as it was and you see a notice with the reason.

Free up the space you have already used

A Media Library that is already full is usually why people look for a plugin like this, so offloading only new uploads would not be much help. The plugin can work through your existing library in the background: press Offload existing media on its settings page and close the tab, or run wp yis offload --all with WP-CLI. A Media Library column shows which files are offloaded and which are still local, and the settings page keeps a running total of the storage you have saved.

The bulk run respects the API's limits (2,000 uploads a day and 20 a minute with the upload-only key). When it reaches a limit it pauses by itself and carries on when the limit resets, so a large library simply takes a few days.

Built so it does not slow your site down

• Small image slots get small files. Thumbnails and grids use YourImageShare's 280 px thumbnail, and offloaded images get a srcset, so a gallery does not download full-size photos.
• No layout shift. The plugin records each image's real width and height before the local file is removed, so pages do not jump while images load.
• Big files are handled safely. Files up to 200 MB are supported, and anything over 20 MB is sent in 5 MB pieces, so a large video never has to fit into PHP's memory on a shared host.
• Full quality. Large images are offloaded from the original, not WordPress's scaled-down copy.

Supported formats are JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF, BMP, TIFF and HEIC/HEIF images, and MP4, WebM, AVI, MOV, MKV, MPEG, WMV, FLV and 3GP videos. Videos that browsers cannot play are converted to MP4 by YourImageShare.

Not a one-way door

Every offloaded file has a Restore to local action in the Media Library and in the attachment details panel. It downloads the file back to your server, and WordPress treats it as a normal local attachment again. If you change your mind about one file or the whole library, you are never stuck.

Set it up in five minutes

1. In WordPress, go to Plugins > Add New, search for YourImageShare Media Offload, then install and activate it.
2. Create a free account on YourImageShare, open My account > API and copy your Upload-only key.
3. Open Media Offload in the WordPress admin menu, paste the key and save.
4. Upload something to the Media Library as usual to see it offload.
5. Optional: press Offload existing media to move the rest of your library.

Your keys and your visitors

The plugin asks for your Upload-only key, not your main API key. That key can upload on your behalf but cannot list or delete anything in your account, so a compromised WordPress install cannot wipe your uploads. The full API key is only needed if you want deleting a file in WordPress to delete it from YourImageShare too.

Offloaded files are stored as private: they load wherever your site uses them, but they get no page of their own on YourImageShare and are not listed publicly. The plugin sends only the file and its name. It does not send post content or anything about your site's users, and it has no analytics or tracking. Because your visitors' browsers load the images from YourImageShare, the plugin adds suggested wording to WordPress's privacy policy guide (Settings > Privacy) so you can tell them. The details are in the WordPress plugin section of our Privacy Policy and Terms.

What it does differently from WordPress

YourImageShare keeps two versions of each image, the full file and a 280 px thumbnail, rather than every size your theme registers. Offloaded images therefore get a two-step srcset instead of WordPress's usual list of sizes, and hard-cropped sizes such as square thumbnails keep the image's own proportions. For most blogs this makes no visible difference; if your theme depends on exact cropped sizes, try it on a few images first and use Restore to local if you prefer the original behaviour.

Keep your normal backups too. Offloading removes local copies, and like any upload, files that break our Terms can be removed from YourImageShare.

Learn more

The plugin uses the same free upload API as our other integrations. For more on keeping a media-heavy site fast, see how to host blog images without slowing your blog and how to host images for a website. Questions or a feature request? Use the plugin's support forum on WordPress.org or our contact form.