How to remove featured images from Wordpress posts?

The featured images in WordPress is one of the most annoying things I experience as I work with WordPress. The main problem is that featured images are needed for pictures to show up on category pages and so on, and that is why I normally use a plugin to automatically add featured images to posts.

But, the next problem is that those featured images often show up in the start of single posts, meaning that I suffer from the same pictures showing up twice within the same article, once on the top and once where I originally intended it to be. That is a stupid duplicate thing, so the question is therefore what can be done to remove featured images from WordPress posts?

There are several ways in which this can be done and I will here describe two ways which can be used.

Remove featured images from WordPress posts!

The editor way of removing featured images from WordPress posts

The first way and the easiest way, at least if you have a blog full of already existing blog posts, is to manually remove the featured images from the .php code of your actual theme. This is often easy, but sometimes it is much more troublesome, depending on the theme. Here are the basics for how you can remove the featured image from top of posts (and pages) manually.

• Open your WordPress Admin, go to Appearance and press Editor.
• Open a file like content.php or single.php (or content-single.php).
• Look through the file and look for code that deals with featured image.  It can look something like this:

[stextbox id=”grey”]<?php the_post_thumbnail(‘featured-image’ , array( ‘class’ => ‘thumbnail img-responsive’ )); ?>[/stextbox]

• Be very careful, make a backup, and have an FTP program ready so you can upload the backup at once in case you harm the file.
• Now try to delete the code telling the featured image to show up in the posts or pages.  Update the file when done.
• Visit your website and one of your posts of pages again and see if it is working.
• If it is working be happy, if it is not working, keep trying even more!
• If your website does not load due to errors, upload your backup of the file you changed using FTP and try again.

This is manually manipulating the source code of the theme and this works quite well. Sometimes the code is fairly well hidden, and it is not enough deleting a code part, but you need to move it to someplace else and so, but in most themes you just find this code and delete the thumbnail line, and it should work out well.

Removing featured images from top of posts the plugin way!

A much better way maybe to fix the problem is to use a plugin for the purpose. The only problem with the plugin (at the moment) is that you need to manually enter all posts all check the box telling that you do want to hide the featured image from top of posts and pages. In other words this will be a big job if you have more than 50 posts and pages waiting for this to happen. I did contact the authors of the plugin so they said they would include the feature in future updates that you could easily make it possible to setup the same option for all posts at once. But, as of know you need to manually edit this in every post.

The name of the plugin is: Hide Featured Image. Search for it among the WordPress plugins and you will find it, download it, activate it and then you can select to hide featured image inside every single post after that.

Go ahead and remove those featured images from the top of your posts. Hope these instructions will help you, but if you have further questions or comments, just write!