Hey, thanks for reaching out, I’ll gladly help!
I noticed that most of your blog posts (which show the generic thumbnail) have this blue button (image) before your images, which is probably the reason why you are experiencing these problems.
The thing is, our plugin is set to take the first image from your blog post to use it as its thumbnail, but since it’s too small (should be at least 151×151 pixels big), it uses our generic thumbnail instead.
There are probably three solutions for your problem:
1.) remove that blue button,
2.) relocate that blue button to some other place in your blog post, so our plugin could extract a proper sized image for its thumbnail, or
3.) set that image that you would like to have as your thumbnail as featured.
Let me know if either of these options work for you or if you have any more questions what-so-ever! Looking forward to your reply!
Best,
Silvo
Thread Starter
frufru
(@frufru)
Hi Silvo,
thank you for your detailed answer. The buttons are relatively new, these open up the fullscreen panoramic pics. Your solutions are logical, I’ll try to figure out which one suits best for us, but it seems we would need make changes on every post. Is there any trick, change of code, where we could force the plugin to use the second image, instead of the first?
Thanks in advance
Hey, thanks for your feedback, we appreciate it!
Well, there is one other solution, but I’m not sure if you are going to gain any additional time with it, I’m afraid to say. You can use WordPress’s Custom field option.
First, open up the edit page of one of your blog posts, open the ‘Screen Options’ drop-down menu on the top right corner and tick the box next to ‘Custom Fields’. A new widget called ‘Custom Fields’ should appear just below your editor, where you can add a new name (e.g. “Zemanta_thumbnails”) and a value (link) to the image which you would like to use as a thumbnail for that particular blog post.
Finally, go to your plugin settings and tick the box next to ‘Use custom field for thumbnails’ and select the “Zemanta_thumbnails” custom field value (or whatever you chose to name it).
This way, you only change the value of your future (or past) blog posts, but the name of that custom field stays the same.
As I said, I don’t know if this is in any way more helpful as the solution I mentioned yesterday, but I felt like I should mention it. But we are also constantly re-thinking the way our thumbnailer works, so it’s possible we come up with another solution in the near future. (Can’t make any promises, though.)
Let me know what you think, you’re feedback is more than appreciated! Take care & have a nice day!
Best,
Silvo
Thread Starter
frufru
(@frufru)
Thanks Silvio again for your help and for your alternate solution. I know this is a special site because it’s not very common to place the same image in every single post. If you visited the site you could see that this image is a button which links to the fullscreen panoramic pictures and in the past when it wasn’t there many users simply wouldn’t click the text link rather the images which came up in a bigger version that time. So that’s the reason for the big buttons. I’ll think about the possibilities, thanks again for your help!
Cheers
Yes, I can completely understand your situation with those buttons and I sincerely hope we’ll find some middle ground. If not immediately, then sometime in the future.
Glad I could be of some help, if any. As always, you know where to reach me for more questions. I’m going to mark this topic as resolved for now, if you have nothing against it.
Take care & have a nice rest of the day!
Best,
Silvo
Hi @silvoslaf,
so, you say, the first image of a blogpost is used. I think this is not really good practice, if i may.
imho, you should check if there is a thumbnail
if yes, use it.
else check if there are associated images
if yes use the first one
else check if images were actually inserted to the content
if yes use the first one
else use custom thumbnail.
I do not really get why you would not care about a post thumbnail, as this is the WordPress way of doing it.
But maybe i missed something here? Would love to read your answer.
Hey @curlybracket, thanks for chipping in, I appreciate your feedback on this matter! But I really think we’re not on the same page here, to be honest.
You said that “check if images were actually inserted to the content
if yes use the first one” — which is exactly what we do. We try to create a thumbnail from the first image that we find in a blog post.
If there’s a featured image set, we prioritize that one.
If there’s a custom field option set in your plugin settings, then we prioritize that image.
If there’s no image in a blog post, no featured image & no custom field value set, we use the one you specified as a default thumbnail in your plugin settings.
So, to sum it up, our thumbnailer works more or less in the following order:
Custom field value > Featured image > First image in blog post > Default image for blog posts without images
Hope that cleared things up a bit, but please do let me know if this isn’t the case, since I’ll be more than glad to help you out!
Take care & I’m looking forward to your reply!
Best,
Silvo
Hi Silvo
thank you very much for your quick answer.
I did not read the source code (too many files…), so thanks for the clarification.
That sounds about right. But, in a lot of WP installs of mine the features image does not seem to be found.
What can be the reason for this? From what i see in your previous answers, it might be the file size. Are there any other restrictions?
Thanks.
Hey, thanks for getting back to me, I appreciate your follow back!
Reasons why most of those featured images are not recognized by our plugin can vary, but in most cases the main one is because of the theme our users are using. Which is exactly why we also implemented that ‘Custom Field’ feature, so that our users can use it when featured images don’t get recognized or when users don’t want them to get extracted to their thumbnails.
The file size can also be a cause why the thumbnails are not extracted, but that only happens with images that are smaller than 150×150 pixels.
May I ask you with which sites are you having those problems (with extracting thumbnails from your featured images)? I’d love to take a closer look at it, if possible.
And please do not hesitate to let me know if you have any more questions regarding our service or if there’s anything else that I missed, since I’ll gladly help!
Take care & have a nice day!
Best,
Silvo
