Please, don’t force us to download plugins’ screenshots

Published: On Sunday, December 14, 2008

Can anybody tell me what is the sense in including plugin's scre­enshots into its main ZIP archive? Does anybody need this, has anybody ever appreciated it?

My opinion is directly the oposite. Not only that I have never appreciated this feature yet, but also it's quite uncomfortable to me – regularly.

  1. more files in plugin's directory make it less clear
  2. these screenshots can mean hundrets of kilobytes to download/upload

Until managers of WordPress official plugin repository decide to fix these unnecessary inclusions, I'd like to please plugins' authors to spend a minute with optimizing size of screenshots. Remember. JPG is better for photos, PNG/GIF (8-bit) is great for screenshots. Wrong. Wrong. Right (too hard to find).

Comments

  1. 1.  Tomáš Kapler wrote: On July 23., 2010 comment number 1

    actually – i need this. If I can choose between several plugins, i'm selecting by the screenshots as a first hint, because it says me

    1. if it do what i need
    2. if the autor is not trying to add some his-own stupid fancy design etc. but is following the wordpress-style.

    of course i do not need theese screenshot in the plugin zip, so for me it is perfectly OK, if the autor add img src from his web or (bit worse) if he add link to external gallery.

  2. 2.  Kahi [author] wrote: On July 23., 2010 comment number 2

    ↪ Tomáš Kapler Yes, that's what was my post about, about attaching them into zip package. It's not a huge problem but annoys me in the same way as useless tenths of language files also included in some plugin packages.

    I also make decision which plugin to try first based on screenshots rather than the description.

I quit working with WordPress, comments are closed. My plugins will not be updated any more – at least not by me. Feel free to modify my source codes though… Also I am not able to provide support, sorry. –Kahi