Autoselect the featured image and creates pixel perfect resizes on the fly without regenerate all the thumbnails.
As of April 2026, Thumbnails and Featured Images is a WordPress media resize plugin with 1.0K+ active installations and a 5/5 rating from 6 reviews. It has been downloaded 39K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 6.1+ and PHP 7.4+. Available on WordPress.org since 2015. Actively maintained — updated within the last month. Downloads are down 64% this week.
WordPress themes need thumbnails in different sizes and they even let the user to change those dimensions.
But WordPress has a problem: it does not regenerates the thumbnails when new sizes are registered.
Thumbnails intercepts the request by themes or plugins to WordPress to get a specific thumbnail, generates it and caches it on disk.
Efficiently, it produces a perfectly cropped image, with the right dimension avoiding unpleasant stretching.
Thumbnails does not modify your blog or your media library. When deactivated the blog returns to its old behavior.
The second important feature is the autoselection of featured image for post which are missing it.
You can choose between the on the fly selection without persist it or, for better performances, to persist it once selected.
Read the Thu…
Great idea, and can go to the next level to be even more awesome…
I like this plugin’s approach of generating thumbnails when asked.
I hope the plugin will be around for a long time.
Or if it were included in the core, it would cut down on wasted unused image files on servers around the world.
Now if only it would support WebP and responsive images, it would be perfect.
Thanks.
I re-use my post thumbnail images in various ways, so I like to upload them full size, and I need the software to resize them as needed. This plugin does exactly that for me.
It performs its magic transparently and makes my pages a lot lighter. Highly recommended.
This plugin solves my problems with the WP thumbnails, thanks Stefano!
Just want the doctor ordered! This plugin solved my nagging issue on a custom theme.
Thank you for sharing.
| WordPress | 6.1+ requiredTested up to 6.9.4 |
| PHP | 7.4+ required |
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.