Unnecessarily duplicates images

I’ve been evaluating your plugin, and it seems to work quite well, however, it also appears to needlessly duplicate images.

If I create a new post, upload an image into the post, and save the post – your plugin will correctly assign that image as the Featured Image / Post Thumbnail. However, it’s not actually assigning THAT image as the featured image. Rather, it’s duplicating that image, uploading a new copy, inserting ANOTHER copy into the media library, and using THAT as the Featured Image.

This seems like a bad idea. It unnecessarily bloats both the webserver, the database, and the Media Library, and leaves people with duplicates of lots of their images – making it much more difficult to manage in the long run.

If the image that wants to become a featured image is already in my Media Library, you should just set the featured_thumbnail_id to BE that thumbnail, rather than duplicating the entire image.

Cheers

http://wordpress.org/plugins/auto-post-thumbnail/