Feature
SAM photographs artworks at archival quality — 3000-5000 pixels per side, 4-8 MB per JPEG. Beautiful for the catalogue; vast overkill for a storefront. Defyn SAM resizes oversized images on import to a width you set (default 1500px, retina-grade for any product page) and cleans up the files cleanly when products leave SAM.
Works on Shopify and WordPress / WooCommerce.
Most plugins sideload whatever SAM hands them, store the original at full resolution, and never clean up. Over months of sync cycles the consequences add up.
Three coordinated mechanisms, each scoped tightly so nothing manually uploaded is ever touched.
ImageSideloader sets _sam_image_id post meta on every attachment it creates. That meta is the safety boundary — manually-uploaded featured images and unrelated media don't carry it and are never touched.
Once media_sideload_image returns the new attachment ID, the plugin checks the source width via wp_get_image_editor. If wider than max_image_width, it resizes in place keeping aspect ratio, then regenerates the thumbnail variants from the resized source.
Stale-cleanup, factory reset, and any future deletion path call MediaCleanup::deleteSamMediaForPost(postId). Only attachments matching post_parent AND carrying _sam_image_id are eligible. wp_delete_attachment with force=true removes both the row and the file.
Sync Dashboard → Maintenance → Clean up orphan media runs MediaCleanup::findAndDeleteOrphanSamMedia which finds attachments whose parent post is missing or zero. Catches up pre-v1.14 leaks and is safe to re-run on a clean site.
Scenario: Hermannsburg had three years of catalogue churn before v1.14 landed. Their /wp-content/uploads/ had grown to 14 GB.
Result: Running the orphan-media sweep deleted ~6,200 attachments left behind by old SAM removals. Storage usage dropped to 4.8 GB without losing a single live product image.
Scenario: A centre kept hitting WP Engine's storage limit during seasonal sync bursts (Christmas, NAIDOC).
Result: Setting max_image_width to 1500 on a fresh sync brought average image size from 4.2 MB to 0.9 MB. Subsequent sync cycles stayed well under the storage quota.
Scenario: A centre needed full-resolution images preserved for in-gallery print sales but resized photos for the web.
Result: max_image_width is per-centre configurable. They set it to 0 (disable resize) and kept the originals. Cascade-delete still applied — they got the cleanup behaviour without the resize.
No — the resize only applies to images going forward. To resize the existing library, either run Sync All with cleanup enabled (the SAM original re-imports and the resize applies to the new copy), or use the WP-CLI `wp media regenerate` command alongside the new setting.
The max_image_width setting is global per site rather than per product. For mixed needs, set the cap high (e.g. 3000) so most photos are kept large but truly oversized ones get capped, or set to 0 to disable entirely.
Both work. The plugin uses WordPress's wp_get_image_editor which auto-selects whichever's available. If neither is present (extremely rare), the resize step logs a warning and skips — the image still imports at full resolution.
Yes. Every delete is gated on _sam_image_id post meta, which is only ever set by the plugin's own ImageSideloader. Manually-uploaded featured images don't carry it and are never touched, even by the orphan sweep.
Nothing destructive. It scans every SAM-origin attachment and only deletes ones whose parent post is missing. On a clean site it finds zero matches and reports "Nothing to clean up — Media Library is already orphan-free." Safe to run any time.
Want a 15-minute screenshare against your actual SAM data? Send us a quick note or call — we’ll line up a walkthrough at a time that suits.
