I run a hobby blog where images are very important but recently, I’ve encountered an issue with jpg artifacts appearing on images uploaded to the media library. Notably, all images uploaded are already optimized. I do not have any image optimization plugins or any site optimizations plugins installed as it will conflict with Ezoic (my ad provider).
Issue: Images get artifacts after uploading to media library.
Fixes Tried:
Tried uploading same images on a different WordPress site. No artifacts appear.
Tried disabling all plugins on a staging site.
Tried switching to Twenty-Twenty One theme.
Tried uploading images using a different browser.
Tried clearing browser cache.
Tried viewing uploaded images on a different PC.
Tried using several variations of the code below to disable WordPress native image compression.
`function custom_jpeg_quality( $quality, $context ) {`
return 100;
`}`
`add_filter( ‘jpeg_quality’, ‘custom_jpeg_quality’, 1, 2 );`
Tried uploading image as PNG. Weirdly, it also got artifacts.
Tried disabling CloudFlare cache by activating Developer Mode on CloudFlare.
Tried disabling Ezoic cache. Tried disabling image optimization on Ezoic.
Tried increasing memory limit and max execution time.
Tried upgrading PHP version to 8.1.
Tried using EWWW Image Optimizer and Imagify.
Tried uploading image using File Manager. Image has no artifacts. As soon as I register the image to the Media library, the artifacts appear.
To add, images are used “Full Size” on posts and not scaled.
To clarify, images have artifacts when viewed in the media library and when used in posts/pages.
All these yielded no results and images still appear as low quality. I’ve been using WordPress for 11 years and this is the first time I encountered this issue.