Duplicate Attachments

Duplicate Attachments will duplicate the attachment and thumbnails, instead of letting WordPress regenerate them. This saves an enormous amount of time and will also preserve any manual changes to the thumbnails.

For example, a post with 5MB of attachments, broadcasted to two blogs:

With normal attachment copying: 30 seconds
With Duplicate Attachments: ~1 second

Activate the plugin in the pack and then check that your existing attachments action is to delete and replace. The plugin will take over copying of attachments automatically from then on.

Comparison of attachment-related plugins

Feature Basic Duplicate Attachments Protect Child Properties Update Attachments
Keeps existing attachments1 Choice No Choice
Thumbnail regeneration speed2 Slow Fast Slow Slow
Updates existing files in place No No No

1 If several posts share the same attachment and it is deleted before broadcasting, the attachment ID will not match that of the newly-copied attachment. Otherwise the automatic deletion of attachments before broadcast is not a problem.

2 Regeneration occurs when an image attachment is copied to the child blog for the first time.

Comments

  1. In the above instructions it says… “check that your existing attachments action is to replace.” Where do you find this?
  2. To be clear, since there isn’t an option for “replace”, is it the option “Delete and then recopy the attachment”?

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