I've noticed articles with a lot of pictures and embedded items have really long read times, is there a way to adjust how read times are calculated to ignore these and just look at the actual content.

I've done that however because some articles will have lots of embedded links and some will have none you still get very inaccurate read times.

For example, if an article only has text that takes maybe 3 minutes to read it will only say it takes 1 minute. And an article with little text but a lot of images and embeds will say 15 minutes. Is there, not a better solution for it to ignore embeds?

I've solved the issue. Here's my solution:

Insert code within this file:
\public_html\wp-content\themes\soledad\inc\template-function.php

add this code:

//Instagram block quote REGEX
$pattern ='/<blockquote class="instagram-media"(.*?)<\/blockquote>/is';

// Remove matching text using preg_replace()
$text = preg_replace($pattern, '', $text);

within the function function penci_estimate_readingtime( $id ) after the $text variable has been defined

Do you have a way of doing this without editing parent theme files? I'm new to custom stuff like this.

Is this something that you still plan on releasing?