Fixing Thumbnail Issues
WordPress is awesome for more reasons than I care to list. You can do anything with WordPress, but when things go wrong, it can be really frustrating. Not knowing what to do or where to go can be scary, and upsetting. Thankfully, there are places to go for help, such as Google+ communities and StackOverflow. You can post questions and get valid responses in minutes. One thing that I have encountered recently in WordPress is an issue that can occur when you switch themes on your site. Sometimes, the post thumbnails get screwed up, which causes your site not to look how it should. This is devastating, especially if your site doesn’t turn out how you expected. Let’s talk about the problem, and I’ll show you a quick and easy fix that will solve the problem.
The Theme’s Not Broken
Just because your featured images or thumbnails don’t look how they are supposed to after switching themes, doesn’t mean that your theme is broken. It just means that the thumbnails aren’t formatted properly.
It’s a Formatting Issue
Sometimes, a theme will generate thumbnails and images of specific sizes, which can cause problems. When you go to switch themes, it hangs on to the old post thumbnails. The theme is using those existing images and plopping them in places where they don’t fit well.
The Hard Way
For your sake, I hope you don’t go this route. I also hope you haven’t already tried to do this. You could delete all of your post thumbnails and re-upload them. This could take hours and is really crazy. If you have an older site, you probably have hundreds, maybe even thousands of posts. When I tell you the easy way, you’ll just die.
The Easy Solution
It turns out, there’s a plugin called Regenerate Thumbnails by Viper007Bond that will automatically generate new thumbnails in the proper format for you. Search for the plugin on WordPress.org, install it, and you’ll find it under Tools in the admin section of your site. Run it, sit back, and your thumbnail issues should be resolved. That’s it! regenerate thumbnails allows you to either regenerate the thumbnails for all image uploads, individual image uploads, or specific multiple image uploads.
Fixing thumbnail issues is that easy!
Hopefully this fixed your thumbnail issues in WordPress. If you are still having issues, it may be something more advanced. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below.