Flying Pigs Uploader Wordpress Plugin - Rating, Reviews, Demo & Download
Plugin Description
On the Media Add New page WordPress uploads one file per request and makes every thumbnail on the server: two hundred photos means two hundred requests, two hundred rounds of server image work, and a host’s rate limiter slowing the lot. WordPress 7.1 moves that work into the browser for block editor uploads, in Chrome and Edge only, and still sends every thumbnail as its own request. Flying Pigs does the image work in your browser for bulk uploads on the Media page, in every modern browser, and ships the results in a few large requests. The same 221 photos that take the Media page twelve minutes on a managed host, and twenty on a large shared host, take Flying Pigs Free two minutes and nineteen, and less again with Pro’s turbo boost.
Found under Media Flying Pigs Uploader.
What is free and what is Pro
Everything an upload needs is free: the browser image engine, every size, WebP and AVIF, optimizing, folders, delivery, retries. Pro adds the power tools for big libraries and product catalogs.
- Sizes made in the browser, no server work. Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- Optimize original (auto rotate, remove metadata). Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- Convert PNG to JPG. Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- WebP and AVIF companions, quality and effort per format. Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- Choose which sizes to make, and which get a companion. Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- WebP/AVIF delivery set up for you. Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- AI Data Mining statement in every file. Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- Media folders (FileBird and friends). Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- Unlimited file size, packed batches. Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- Retry, run recovery, throttling. Free: yes. Pro: yes.
- Resize image before upload. Free: no. Pro: yes, 2560×2560 by default.
- WebP only (drop the JPEG/PNG base). Free: no. Pro: yes, on by default.
- Watermark, with a text and logo maker. Free: no. Pro: yes.
- Turbo boost, up to six upload lanes. Free: one lane. Pro: yes.
- Link check: your line and this host timed, lanes and first batch sized from it. Free: no. Pro: yes.
- Overwrite in place, references repaired. Free: no. Pro: yes.
- File date: the file’s own date, or one you pick. Free: this month. Pro: yes.
- Set post date apart from the file date. Free: no. Pro: yes.
- Photos onto WooCommerce products by the SKU in their names, as they land. Free: no. Pro: yes.
- Updates and support. Free: WordPress.org. Pro: the Pro update channel and the help desk.
Free shows every Pro control in place, disabled and badged PRO, so you can see where it would sit. The Free plugin carries none of the Pro code.
Flying Pigs Free and the Media page, side by side
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Speed, 221 photos (209 MB), same files, same day. WebP-only, HTTP/2, lean installs with no other plugin hooking uploads. The image work is in your browser, so the host’s per-file resizing never enters the race.
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A managed host. WP Media page: 12:20. Free, one lane: 2:19. Pro turbo, two lanes: 2:12.
- A budget LiteSpeed host. WP Media page: 15:47. Free, one lane: 4:23. Pro turbo, two lanes: 2:55.
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A large shared host, its optimizer off. WP Media page: 20:05. Free, one lane: 11:08. Pro turbo, two lanes: 6:09.
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Ready the moment it lands. WordPress: uploads the original, then resizes on the server; optimizers finish later still, on a background job or the first visitor. Flying Pigs Free: every file lands already final, with nothing left to wait on.
- Optimized originals. WordPress: the original is stored as it came off the camera. Flying Pigs Free: the original is optimized in the browser at its own dimensions, about 60% smaller, auto rotated, metadata removed, written in sRGB with no embedded profile; PNG to JPG is a tick away.
- WebP and AVIF. WordPress: a separate plugin, server-side, after the upload. Flying Pigs Free: built in, made in the browser, quality and effort per format, a companion that came out larger discarded, and you choose which sizes get one. The Delivery panel tests your server and sets delivery up for you, or hands off to the delivery plugin you already run.
- AI Data Mining. WordPress: nothing. Flying Pigs Free: the IPTC rights statement (“No AI training, allow search indexing” by default) written into every file the browser makes.
- Media folders on upload. WordPress: whatever your folder plugin bolts on. Flying Pigs Free: pick the folder in the run options; FileBird, Real Media Library, CatFolders, Mediamatic, Folders by Premio, Wicked Folders, HappyFiles and any hierarchical media taxonomy, with subfolders shown as a tree.
- File size. WordPress: capped by the host’s upload limit. Flying Pigs Free: unlimited, chunked under the limit.
- A failed upload. WordPress: failed. Flying Pigs Free: retried, and a run survives a dropped connection or an expired login.
- Uploads that adapt to your line and your host. WordPress: no. Flying Pigs Free: batches sized to your line as the run goes.
- Optimizer plugins. WordPress: every upload is handed to Smush, EWWW, ShortPixel or the host’s optimizer to be done again on the server. Flying Pigs Free: its uploads are already optimized, so they are hidden from those plugins’ on-upload hooks and land once.
- Cost, limits, accounts. WordPress: free. Flying Pigs Free: free, no quota, no account, nothing leaves your site.
What Pro adds
- Resize image. Free optimizes the original at its own dimensions. Pro fits it within a width and height before upload (2560×2560 by default, WordPress’s own big-image threshold, never upscaled), so a 6,000-pixel camera file never reaches the server.
- WebP only. Free keeps the JPEG or PNG and adds the WebP beside it. Pro, on by default, writes the base and every size as WebP and keeps no JPEG or PNG alongside (AVIF companions can still sit beside them). Half the files, so it saves disk and, more to the point, inodes, and browsers get the WebP directly with no delivery layer. Turn it off to keep the originals. On a slow host the smaller uploads win outright (a throttled shared host, 221 photos: WebP-only 2:34 vs JPEG 3:37).
- Watermark. Bring your own, or build one on the fly in the what-you-see-is-what-you-get maker with your text and logo. Applied in the browser before upload, on every size, when Optimize original is on.
- Turbo boost upload speed. Free: one upload lane. Pro: up to six parallel lanes. On a host that throttles each connection this is the whole game — one that holds every HTTP/2 stream to about 0.25 MB/s moves roughly six times as much on six lanes; on a fast uncapped link the gain is smaller.
- Link check. Times your line against Cloudflare’s nearest edge and one stream to this host, says which of the two sets the pace, and sizes the first batch and the lane count from it. Pro only, and only when you press the button (an automatic mode is a separate switch, off by default). Free makes no call outside your site.
- Overwrite in place. Re-upload a file with the same name and it replaces the existing attachment at the same URLs, then the builder, gallery and cache references to the old size files are repaired: post content, post meta and options, Kadence and Spectra galleries, stale srcset lists, and the Elementor, Divi and Smart Slider 3 caches.
- File date and post date. Free files every upload under this month’s folder and lists it under today. Pro’s File date picker lands the file in the month of its own date, or a date you choose; Set post date is a separate choice — now, the file’s date, or another date — so a product line can be filed under its own directory on disk and still show as today’s import in the library.
- Updates and support. Pro updates arrive through WordPress’s own Plugins screen from the Flying Pigs channel, and the help desk is a click away in the page.
What it does
- Every registered image size is made in your browser, so the server does no image work at all. Every file is written in sRGB with no embedded profile: wide-gamut sources (Display P3, Adobe RGB) are converted first, so colours come out right.
- The original is optimized in the browser by default (about 60% smaller, auto rotated, metadata removed; turn it off to upload it as it is), and PNG to JPG conversion is a tick away.
- WebP and AVIF companions for the original and every size, with a quality and effort per format, and an option to discard a companion that came out larger. The Sizes panel picks which sizes are made and which get a WebP or an AVIF.
- Delivery: the companions use the standard sidecar name (photo.jpg.webp) that delivery plugins already understand; if one is active the panel says so. Otherwise “Set up delivery for me” tests the server and turns on a rewrite in the site .htaccess where the host honours it (WebP and AVIF, Vary: Accept) or a wrap on the page everywhere else. Reversible any time.
- An AI Data Mining statement in every file the browser makes: the IPTC “Data Mining” rights statement (IPTC Photo Metadata Standard 2023.1), “No AI training, allow search indexing” by default.
- Packed batches: hundreds of chunks and items travel in one ~25 MB request, dozens of requests per thousand files instead of thousands, which is what keeps a host’s rate limiting out of the way.
- Unlimited file size: files are chunked to fit under the host’s upload limit, so a 1 GB file goes through a 2 MB limit.
- Retry on error: a failed request is re-sent, in smaller batches when the host refuses the size, and a run survives a dropped connection, a login that expires mid-run, or a lost response.
- Media folders on upload for FileBird, Real Media Library, CatFolders, Mediamatic, Folders by Premio, Wicked Folders, HappyFiles and any hierarchical media taxonomy, shown as a tree.
- A progress card that pops out into its own window, with MB/s and files per second, and badges that list failed files and network errors as they happen.
- Throttling for shared hosts: upload rate, batch size, pause every N seconds, and a cap on image workers.
Free means free
There is no file limit, no monthly quota and no account. Your files go to your own site only.
Requirements
- A browser with WebAssembly threads: Chrome, Edge, Brave, Safari 16.4 or later, and Firefox all run the engine (verified on a live site); the plugin’s test suite runs in Chrome. iPad and iPhone browsers usually refuse the engine’s memory and work in fallback mode (see the FAQ).
- HTTPS (or localhost). The engine needs SharedArrayBuffer, which browsers enable only in a secure, cross-origin-isolated page. Without it the page falls back to classic uploads with server-side thumbnails and says so in its header.
- No web-server configuration. The page fetches the engine’s files once and starts every worker from blobs of them, so the files need no headers or MIME types of their own on Apache, LiteSpeed or nginx.
- No PHP limits to raise. Batches are capped at 25 MB, or 90% of the host’s upload limit when that is lower, and sized down from there to your measured line; a file larger than a batch is sent in chunks.
External services
None. Flying Pigs Free makes no call to any outside service: the image work happens in your browser and the uploads go to this site’s own REST API. Nothing is sent anywhere else, and nothing is collected. (The Pro version has a link check, a speed test against Cloudflare’s speed-test endpoint that runs when its button is pressed; the free plugin carries none of that code.)
Source code
The image engine is wasm-vips, libvips compiled to WebAssembly by Kleis Auke Wolthuizen (MIT), from https://github.com/kleisauke/wasm-vips. The files under vendor/wasm-vips (vips-es6.js, vips.wasm and vips-heif.wasm) are that project’s published npm release 0.0.18, unmodified; vendor/wasm-vips/SOURCE.txt records the release, the SHA-256 of each file, and the build instructions. The two .wasm files are the engine itself: every size, WebP and AVIF file is made by them in the browser, and they are served from your own site because the plugin loads no code from anywhere else. The plugin’s own worker, vendor/wasm-vips/fpig-vips-worker.js, and everything else in the plugin are plain source.
Fonts: DSEG (SIL OFL 1.1) for the run timer and Fredoka (SIL OFL 1.1) for the wordmark, both under vendor/ with their licenses.
Screenshots
The uploader: drop zone, run bar, and the Media, Sizes, Delivery and Advanced panels.
