You’re staring at a “Reset” button in the AWP Images module, and your stomach drops a little. You’ve spent weeks letting the plugin convert your media library to AVIF, and the thought of losing that work — hundreds of already-optimized images — is enough to make anyone hesitate before clicking.

Here’s the short answer: no, resetting the Images module’s settings does not delete your already-optimized images. It only resets how the plugin behaves going forward. The AVIF files already sitting in your media library stay exactly where they are.

But there’s a second, related question that trips people up, because AWP has more than one “reset” button, and they don’t all work the same way. Let’s walk through both clearly, so you never have to guess again.

The mental model: settings vs. files

The easiest way to think about this is to separate two things that live in completely different places:

• Settings (configuration) — stored in your WordPress database. These are just instructions: “convert new uploads to AVIF,” “strip EXIF data,” “cap image width at 2000px,” and so on. They control what happens next time something is processed.
• Files (the actual images) — stored on your server’s disk, inside your uploads folder. These are the real AVIF variants that were already generated and saved into your media library.

A settings reset touches only the first category. It’s the equivalent of turning a dial back to its default position — it doesn’t reach into your uploads folder and start deleting things. The AVIF files that already exist were created as real, physical files during past processing, and a configuration change has no mechanism to remove them.

What actually happens when you reset the Images module

When you reset the Images module’s settings in AWP, here’s what changes:

• Any custom values you set — quality level, max dimensions, format preferences, EXIF handling — revert to their defaults.
• Future image uploads and processing will follow those default settings from now on.
• The plugin’s behavior going forward is affected — not anything it already did.

Here’s what does not happen:

• No AVIF files are deleted.
• No images already in your media library are touched, converted back, or modified.
• Your original uploaded images (which AWP never alters in the first place) remain exactly as they were.

If you reset and then look at your media library, you’ll find it unchanged. The only difference you’ll notice is that the next image you upload gets processed using the default settings rather than whatever custom configuration you had before.

This is intentional. Settings and generated output are kept separate on purpose, so that adjusting a setting is a safe, low-stakes action — not something that risks hours of prior optimization work.

The important exception: Accelerate Existing Content’s reset is different

This is the nuance worth remembering, because it’s easy to conflate two buttons that look similar but behave differently.

AWP’s Accelerate Existing Content module has its own reset action, and it works on a different principle. That module runs a personalized optimization pass across your existing pages — deciding the right image size for each device and generating the AVIF variants needed to serve those specific results.

When you reset an optimization in that module (as opposed to resetting the Images module’s settings), AWP does remove the AVIF variants it generated for that particular optimization. That’s because those variants are tied directly to the optimization result — they only make sense together. Resetting the optimization is meant to fully undo it, so the plugin cleans up the files that were created specifically for it.

How to tell the two resets apart

A simple rule of thumb: if the button is changing a setting (a checkbox, a slider, a dropdown default), it’s safe and only affects the future. If the button is undoing a completed optimization or action AWP already performed, expect it to clean up the specific files that action produced — because that’s what “undo” means in that context.

If you’re ever unsure which kind of reset you’re looking at, check what module you’re in and what the button’s label says it’s resetting: a general settings panel versus a specific optimization run are different things, even when both use the word “reset.”

Why this design makes sense

It would be frustrating — and honestly a little dangerous — if every settings tweak in a plugin risked wiping out generated files. Imagine changing an image quality slider and accidentally deleting your entire optimized media library. That’s not how AWP is built.

Instead, AWP treats configuration and output as separate layers: settings describe intent, and generated files (like AVIF variants) are the physical result of applying that intent at a specific point in time. Changing intent doesn’t retroactively erase results. Only an action that’s explicitly about undoing a specific result — like the Accelerate Existing Content optimization reset — touches the files tied to that result.

This separation also fits how AWP handles optimization more broadly: because changes are applied at the output layer and your original posts, pages, and uploaded images are never modified, everything AWP does is reversible in a predictable, well-defined way. Nothing happens by accident, and nothing is destructive unless the action is explicitly designed to undo something specific.

The bottom line

If you’re staring at the Images module’s reset button, worried about your AVIF library: click it with confidence. It only changes settings for future processing — your already-optimized images stay exactly where they are.

Just remember the one place where “reset” really does mean “delete generated files”: the Accelerate Existing Content module’s optimization reset, which removes the AVIF variants tied to that specific optimization run. Know which reset you’re clicking, and you’ll never be caught off guard.