2020 Best Free Auto Featured Image Plugin for Guest Writers WordPress

Having a blog that accepts guest posts is a great way to foster growth and share creativity. If you choose to accept external posts, you will need a way to receive them without adding additional risk by letting people write directly to your blog. With this use-case, you are looking for an auto featured image plugin for WordPress.

There are a few ways to accept articles such as through a webform or by email. The downside to accepting articles this way is properly placing pictures especially the featured image if your WordPress theme relies on them. The post will take some of the trial and error legwork out needed to test plugins until you find the right one.

Featured Image from URL

The first plugin I tested was Featured Image from URL or FIFU for short. Of the plugins tested this was the worse because it didn’t work. The moment I enabled FIFU, all my featured images disappeared. I used the troubleshooting information to clear the metadata, but could never get images to appear. The troubleshooting guide also mentioned running SQL queries, but I chose to move on instead of manually modifying my database.

Quick Featured Images

The next test was Quick Featured Images by Martin Stehle. Quick Featured Images offers wizard-style navigation in the overview menu to guide you through settings or you can set them manually under bulk edit. The idea of bulk edit is nice, but the use-case for this feature is limited to using the same image for multiple past posts. There is an option labeled “Do you want to assign the first image of each post?” but to use it you have to purchase the pro version.

In the settings menu, you can set the featured image on new posts as the first image, but you cannot do this manually with an update.

So far, even without the pro version features this is the best auto featured image tool.

Auto Post Thumbnail & Image Search For Elementor

I tried auto post thumbnail next, but it was severely lacking features in the free version. One main feature that was missing is the ability to select a new featured image from the All Posts details display. On the other hand, it has settings to use an image from the post, find one from the title, or do both.

The major negative for Auto Post Thumbnail was when I went to update a category for an old post. It removed the picture I had saved and overwrote it with text.