Is Thumbnail Upscale free?

Yes, Thumbnail Upscale is free to use. It is available as a free plugin on WordPress.org.

How many websites use Thumbnail Upscale?

Thumbnail Upscale has 4.0K+ active installations as tracked by WordPress.org.

What are the best Thumbnail Upscale alternatives?

Popular alternatives to Thumbnail Upscale include Firelight Lightbox, Imsanity, Menu Image, Icons made easy. You can compare them side-by-side on our comparison pages.

Does Thumbnail Upscale work with the latest WordPress?

Thumbnail Upscale has been tested up to WordPress 4.6.30. It requires WordPress 3.5.1+ and PHP false+.

PluginSift

Thumbnail Upscale

Name: Thumbnail Upscale
Rating: 4.8 (22 reviews)
Author: Stanislav Khromov

Enables upscaling of thumbnails for small media attachments

By Stanislav Khromov·Image·Free

4.8(22 reviews)

·4.0K+ active installs·Updated 8 years ago

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As of April 2026, Thumbnail Upscale is a WordPress image plugin with 4.0K+ active installations and a 4.8/5 rating from 22 reviews. It has been downloaded 44K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 3.5.1+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2013. Last updated 8 years ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are down 23% this week. Top alternative: Firelight Lightbox.

4.8/522 reviews

4.0K+active installs

44K+total downloads

13 yearssince 2013

Overview

This plugin enables upscaling of thumbnails for small media attachments. The default behaviour of WordPress is to not upscale small images, which means
you are never guaranteed a certain size for a thumbnail format. This plugin corrects that and upscales small images to the specified thumbnail dimensions.
This is beneficial in grid layouts where images of different sizes can make the grid malfunction.

Check screenshots for an example!

Important: Your thumbnails format must have the crop setting enabled to be processed by this plugin.

Usage

After you have enabled Thumbnail Upscale plugin, all your future uploaded images will be upscaled.
For existing images, install and run Force Regenerate Thumbnails
This will upscale your existing media images!

Requirements

PHP 5.2 or higher strongly re…

Read full description on WordPress.org

Screenshots

Ratings & Reviews

4.822 reviews

5 ★

4 ★

3 ★

2 ★

1 ★

Recent Reviews

Still works

by alexio101·2 years ago

That was a pleasant surprise. Still works and did a good job upscaling the image thumbnails.

It’s still relevant god damn it

by Denis·6 years ago

Whaaaaat? You don’t use this plugin? It’s good.

Not working 100% anymore

by kush1960·7 years ago·1 reply

I’ve been using this great plugin for a number of years with no problems.
It still works for some images but I have been getting blank images returned. I believe it’s something to do with the srcset parameter WP has introduced.

Works like a charm !

by deimz·7 years ago

Thanks a lot for this tools ! It works very great with Regenerate Thumbnails plugin ! It saved me a lot of time

Exactly what I needed

by Selrond·8 years ago

If you add a new, custom image size (with crop argument set to 1) in WordPress, and uploaded image is smaller than that size, WordPress will not scale it up (effectively breaking the aspect ratio), which might break your design / layout, that depends on certain image size.

This plugin scales your image up first, and then crop it, so you always have all sizes ready.