How to Set Up the Image Thumbnail Options for E&T

NOTE: Excerpts & Thumbnails is being discontinued. A new Templates add-on will be introduced very soon. Existing users of Excerpts & Thumbnails are urged to switch to this new add-on for displaying feed items. Learn more.

As soon as you install and activate the Excerpts & Thumbnails add-on, two new sections will appear in the Settings section of WP RSS Aggregator.

The second is called Thumbnails. Thumbnail Settings can do the following:

Provide a featured thumbnail per Feed Item.
Set a default Thumbnail if a Feed Item has no image in the original content.
Set thumbnail dimensions.
Provide a link to the source via the Thumbnail.

The Settings

Enable thumbnails

As it states in its description, check this box to enable the thumbnail functionality brought in by the Excerpts & Thumbnails add-on. Once enabled, the thumbnail image used for each feed item is imported and downloaded to your Media Library,

Default thumbnail image

From here you can choose the image you’d like to use as the Default thumbnail image. You can choose one from your Media Library or upload any other image.

Thumbnail image width

From here you can set the width (in pixels) of the thumbnail image.

Thumbnail image height

From here you can set the height (in pixels) of the thumbnail image.

Link thumbnail to permalink

By checking this box you are linking the thumbnail to the feed item’s permalink. By doing this, when a user clicks on the image, they are immediately directed to the permalink in question.

When feed item has no thumbnail

If a feed item has no thumbnail you can choose what to do from here. Your options are to either use the Default thumbnail you set further up on this page, or to show no thumbnail whatsoever.

Image to use as thumbnail

This is where you decide which image you’re going to use as the thumbnail image. These are your options:

Auto Detect – This uses the method used in the older versions of Excerpts & Thumbnails. It uses whichever image is found first by using the following methods, in this order:
- Image in <media:thumbnail> tag
- First image in excerpt
- Image in <enclosure> tag
First image in excerpt – This option will use the first image it finds in the excerpt (if there are any) as the thumbnail image.
Image in <media:thumbnail> tag – This option will use the image found within the <media:thumbnail> tag in the RSS feed, if there is one.
Image in <enclosure> tag – This option will use the image found within the <enclosure> tag in the RSS feed, if there is one.

Default thumbnail image preview

Here you’ll be able to view a preview of the Default thumbnail image you selected further up on this page.

NOTE: If you set the image size (height and width) to be larger than the size of the images you are importing, this will result in a black background bring applied around the original image, to fill in space until the edges of the set size.