A small lightweight plugin to set external/remote images as post thumbnail/featured image.
As of April 2026, WP Remote Thumbnail is a WordPress featured image plugin with 90 active installations and a 3.5/5 rating from 8 reviews. It has been downloaded 11K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 4.4+ and PHP 5.4+. Available on WordPress.org since 2014. Top alternative: Auto Featured Image (Auto Post….
WP Remote Thumbnail is a very lightweight WordPress plugin that comes with zero configuration and one-click setup. Using this plugin, you can easily set any external image as the featured image of any post/page or even custom post types.
This plugin automatically adds a custom metabox to each post type that supports post thumbnails. You just need to copy and paste the URL of any image into the metabox and click publish/update.
| WordPress | 4.4+ requiredTested up to 6.9.4 |
| PHP | 5.4+ required |
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.