that is likely related to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5107, which limits the resolution of thumbnails.
the client you are using is probably only displaying the thumbnails to you, not the original images.
edit: this seems to include lemmy-ui as well
edit 2: raised a bug report for lemmy-ui
You basically can’t if your instance was set up before 0.19.4, as there won’t be any association between users and uploads for older uploads. You also can’t do this without breaking thumbnails everywhere unfortunately.
The latest Lemmy version has a fix where thumbnails now are actually stored at a reasonable resolution for thumbnails, but old thumbnails may be quite large, and this does not retroactively shrink older thumbnails.
It’s possible to pull image aliases from the DB and ignore them when iterating over aliases within pict-rs, but you these will only be manual uploads, not automatic uploads like generated thumbnails. For posts by local users, deleting thumbnails will also end up breaking them for 0.19.5+ instances, as they should reuse the original thumbnail url.