How to show Specified Featured Image Only and not Post Images

LOL, that’s a skeleton of what should work that I posted on the Studio Press forums earlier this week 🙂

I can explain, and yes, this is a Genesis problem that’s been around since WordPress went to the Featured Image option in, what was it, version 2.9, I think.

If you set a specific Featured Image using the meta box in a new post, that’s your Featured Image, as expected. But if you do not set a Featured Image, Genesis will by default choose the first post image, and use it as a Featured Image, with no way for anyone to override it in any setting, without coming up with a specific filter or function to alter that behavior.

To be clear, this is behavior seen when viewing category/content archives. If viewing the actual post, you won’t see the featured image, but if you view, say, the category News, articles that you didn’t set a featured image for will display the first post image as a featured image if you have the Genesis settings set to “Show Featured Image” in the content archives settings.

I pasted that snippet in the thread francky started over at the Studio Press forums, while still looking for the particular snippet I’d seen before that came close, and I hadn’t found it yet. What I did find this morning is something close, but it won’t work as-is for what he (and a lot of other people) want in terms of functionality.

I found this snippet at Greg Rickaby’s site: http://gregrickaby.com/genesis-code-snippets/

/** Add custom post image above post title */
add_action( 'genesis_before_post_content', 'generate_post_image', 5 );
function generate_post_image() {

	if ( is_page() || ! genesis_get_option( 'content_archive_thumbnail' ) )
		return;

	if ( $image = genesis_get_image( array( 'format' => 'url', 'size' => genesis_get_option( 'image_size' ) ) ) ) {
		printf( '<a href="%s" rel="bookmark"><img class="post-image" src="%s" alt="%s" /></a>', get_permalink(), $image, the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' ) );
	}

}
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It looks like it should be easy enough to modify it to only display a set Featured Image, and not display anything if one isn’t specifically set… I just haven’t had time to play with it to get it tweaked properly.

More info: if you set the content limit, you can still have the Featured Image set, it’s not automatically stripped away as you stated in a previous thread.

You can test this for yourself like this:

Create three posts in a category, set a specific feature image in two of them, and insert a post image that’s of a smaller width than what’s defined for the chosen feature image for archives in the third one.

When you view that category listing, with either content limit or excerpts, that article without a defined featured image will display the post image you used as the featured image, and it won’t be as wide as the other images.

Not even the Featured Widget Amplified plugin gets around this behavior.

I’ve been running several magazine sites since 2005, and this Featured Image conundrum has been a problem since before Studio Press moved to Genesis. I got around it by training my magazine contributors to always use a Featured Image of a specific size, no matter what size post image they included. I still get uneven images now and then, but people forget instructions, so what can you do? 🙂

I’m better at tweaking PHP now than I was a few years ago, but with having to make sure sites won’t break with WP 3.6 and Genesis 2.0 updates, and figuring out what I can update now and what has to wait until later for both my sites and my client sites, I just didn’t have time to tackle and test out what would specifically work for this scenario now.

I was just happily surprised to finally run into someone else who thought this behavior was a problem!