How to View the Full-Sized Version of Any Image on a WordPress Site

Viewing the full-sized version of any image on a WordPress site is quite a bit easier than you may think. If you’re looking at a resized image on a WordPress site and want to see the full-sized original image, today’s Quick Guide is for you.

To view the full-sized version of any WordPress image, you’ll use a browser trick that’s based on the way WordPress’s system of custom image sizes alters image file URLs.

Here’s a video explaning how to do this:

How to View Full-Sized Images in WordPress

There are two fundamental steps to this trick:

1. Opening the image in a new tab. This lets you work with the image—and its URL—directly.
2. Removing size modifiers from the URL. This is the main piece of the trick.

1. Open Image in a New Tab

To open an image in a new tab, right-click on the image and select “Open image in new tab” from the menu.

This works in all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, though the exact wording in the right-click menu might vary slightly between browsers.

Locating and Removing WordPress’s URL-based Image Size Modifiers

WordPress automatically generates multiple sizes of every image that you upload to the site, and it automatically creates a custom URL for each new image size it makes.

And so, to see the original image size, all you need to do is to remove the “custom” piece of the URL. In our example, here’s how that worked:

1. I uploaded an image named stock_photo.jpg.
2. WordPress placed that image’s main file, at https://wpshout.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/stock_photo.jpg.
3. Many other sizes of that image were also generated, such as the “Medium” size of that image, at https://wpshout.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/stock_photo-300x200.jpg.
   As you can see, our URL now contains -300x200, signifying that this is an image that’s 300 pixels wide and 200 pixels high.
4. After that, I used WordPress’s image editor to crop the image. These changes are also reflected in the image’s URL, where -edited has been added to it.
   Now the final URL is: https://wpshout.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/stock_photo-edited-300x300.jpg.

Knowing this, all you have to do to get the full-sized image is delete the URL modifiers. In other words, you start with this:

https://wpshout.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/stock_photo-edited-300x300.jpgCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

And delete WordPress’s URL modifiers – -edited-300x300 – to get this:

https://wpshout.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/stock_photo.jpgCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

That’s the full size of the image, which you’re free to view in-browser!

Viewing the Full Size of WordPress Images Served via CDN

Sites using content delivery networks (CDNs) serve images slightly differently, but it’s the same basic trick. For example, if a site is using Jetpack CDN you start with:

https://i0.wp.com/wpshout.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/stock_photo.jpg?resize=1024%2C682&ssl=1Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

And remove URL modifiers ?resize=1024%2C682&ssl=1 to get the full-sized image at:

https://i0.wp.com/wpshout.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/stock_photo.jpgCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

And That’s How to View WordPress Full-Sized Images!

I find this trick useful all the time both in my work, and in my general use of the internet. The WordPress world (that’s now about a third of the web!) is suddenly full of big, beautiful, full-sized images anytime I want them.

Thanks for reading!