Coverpeek – Auto Thumbnails with Live Preview

The PHP GD library used to draw the thumbnail doesn't reliably render characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (which includes most emoji), and the bundled font has no emoji glyphs either. To avoid garbled output, these characters are removed before the thumbnail is drawn; the rest of the title is unaffected.

No. The thumbnail is generated once, at the moment a post is saved, and served afterward as a regular static image file — exactly like a manually uploaded featured image. Enabling or disabling the optional OGP tag output also has no measurable effect on page load time.

In most cases, no — your SEO plugin is very likely already outputting these tags, and enabling both would create duplicates. This setting is intended for sites that don't already have OGP tags. If a supported SEO plugin is detected as active, a warning is shown next to this setting.

PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, and BMP. The recommended size is 1200 x 630px.

No. The plugin only ever replaces images that it generated itself; a manually set featured image is never touched.

By default, only blog posts (the "post" type). You can enable pages and any other public post type (including custom post types added by another plugin or your theme) from the Post types tab in the settings screen — just check the ones you want. Non-public post types (used internally by some plugins for their own data) aren't shown, since generating a thumbnail for them wouldn't make sense.

For any post type you've enabled (see the Post types tab), a thumbnail is generated whenever you save a published item of that type that, at that exact moment, has no featured image at all. It's regenerated (the old one replaced) when it already has a featured image, but that image is one this plugin generated and the title has changed since it was generated. In every other case — a manually-set featured image, or a generated one whose title hasn't changed — saving does nothing to the featured image. This means removing a generated thumbnail doesn't "turn the feature off" for that post: the post now has no featured image, and the very next time it's edited in any way and saved, a new thumbnail will be generated, because the plugin always fills in a missing featured image on save. If you want to stop this plugin from auto-generating one for a specific post, set a featured image manually (even a simple placeholder) rather than leaving it empty — a manually-set image is never touched. For example:

1. Save (publish) the post — a thumbnail is generated and set automatically.
2. Later, change the post's title and save it again — since the featured image is one this plugin generated and the title has changed since then, it's regenerated at this point to match the new title.

No — drafts and scheduled ("future") posts are left alone; nothing is generated while a post is in either of those states. Once a scheduled post is actually published (whether WordPress publishes it automatically at its scheduled time, or you publish it manually), a thumbnail is generated at that point, exactly as with any other publish.

Yes — if you remove the featured image and save the post right away (in the same editing session), that save leaves it without one, as explained above:

1. Save (publish) the post — a thumbnail is generated and set automatically.
2. While still on the edit screen, remove that featured image, then save — the post now has no featured image at all.

Right after you remove it and save, the post is left without a featured image — nothing is generated in that same save. The old generated image itself stays in the Media Library in case you want to reuse it; it isn't deleted automatically unless the post itself is permanently deleted. However, as explained above, editing and saving that post again later (while it still has no featured image set) will generate a new thumbnail automatically.

By default, an "Auto" badge already appears on generated images in the Media Library. If you'd also like this in the Posts list, turn on "Show a thumbnail column with an 'Auto' badge in the Posts list" in the Other tab (it's off by default there, since some themes and plugins already show their own thumbnail column). Once enabled, the Posts list (and any other post type you've enabled) shows a small thumbnail for each item, with an "Auto" badge on the ones this plugin generated — so you can tell them apart from featured images you set yourself at a glance.

Deleting the plugin removes its settings from the database. The images it generated are kept in your Media Library on purpose, because your posts are using them as featured images. If you don't want them any more, you can delete them from the Media Library yourself.