Where are the resized images coming from?

These various resized images come from registered image sizes, usually from your theme, and sometimes from plugins. If a theme registers an image size, it expects to use that size in the front-end. This is most useful in an image gallery or slideshow, when you need images to be an exact ratio of width to height in order to get everything to line up.

Unless your production server is completely anemic, or you’re running a multisite with hundreds of subsites, the resized images are unlikely to have a big impact. I’ve been supporting WordPress sites for clients for the last five years, and the largest one I ever saw took up 1 GB on my hard drive.

TL,DR: don’t worry about it. The amount of time it takes to find some kind of solution will cost more than paying for one size up in server over the next 3 years.

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