Good enough for me to PAY for it!

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    <p>I’ve been using APT (Auto Post Thumbnail) for quite a while; it’s the tool you need if you’ve configured your WordPress installation to act as a feed aggregator (which is what I do in a few sites), since you’ll have to deal with the featured image in some way, and APT is certainly among the best.</p>
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    <p>I also use it quite a lot with sites where either one of the following things is common:</p>
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    1. You change themes with some regularity. The way themes deal with the featured image is never consistent. Sometimes it gets automatically posted on the places you wish (e.g. archives, search); sometimes it isn’t; often it appears quite distorted (or cropped) as an article header. As a consequence, depending on the theme, you may wish to either use featured images or not (and just post your favourite image in the article body itself), and change that procedure later, when you switch to a completely different theme. APT deals with it automatically for you!

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    2. Your writers/contributors are not acquainted with the many tricks that WordPress does, and may never bother to check if they should have a featured image or not. Or some do that consistently, while others never do it, while still uploading images to display inside their articles. APT will make sure that all articles have a thumbnail image!

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    3. Because of theme constraints, some image sizes are more appropriate than others for the featured image, but you cannot rely on either your Photoshopping skills, or on your writers’ skills, to correctly resize the featured image before posting the article. Also, when a theme is changed, the ‘correct’ size might change (it usually will). Once again, APT is your friend here, and makes sure that you will get the correct size for the current theme — which you will be able to change later on if you need.

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    4. What about those pesky cases when an article does not have any image at all? A good example is posting some code in a programming language, to exemplify configuration settings, or something similar that really does not require a featured image at all. This will mean that such articles will display a blank image, or, worse, a silly default image (a question mark or something similar) on certain archive/search lists, or on related content, etc. Well, APT can be configured to always include a thumbnail image for every article, even if it’s just the title written on top of a background image that is consistent with the remaining theme design.

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    <p>This made me actually buy one of their unlimited licenses for APT (sometimes you get them at a hefty discount, well worth the money!), because, as a bonus, you get a reasonably good batch utility (it may take hours to add thumbnails if you have dozens of thousands of articles — which I do! — but it will work well, never running out of memory or hitting any further server limits, adjusting itself to consume as many resources as the system is happy to provide it), as well as a clever AI (IBM Watson) which will pick a free stock image out of popular services out there (Unsplash, Pixabay, Google…) — on those cases where you don’t have a ‘good’ image to display as thumbnail. Naturally enough, all Media dialogue boxes that are called from some action inside WordPress (not only when selecting a new image to embed in the main article, but also on other parts of the WordPress admin panel, such as image selection for the current theme’s many options) will also feature a new APT tab, where the power of AI to figure out the ‘best’ free image out there — according to context — can be selected as well.</p>
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    <p>APT is one of those plugins that works mostly in the background, and that your authors/contributors/writers will not interact much with (except when searching for appropriate free stock images!), but when it stops working, you immediately notice something is seriously wrong, when suddenly all recent posts appear without an image!</p>
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    <p>Try with the free version first, and if, like myself, you rely a lot on automated posts (which may or not have all the appropriate thumbnails…), you’ll quickly see the power of APT and what it can do for your site, and very likely get you start thinking about upgrading to the Pro version.</p>
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    <p>Note that I haven’t reviewed any other ‘competitor’ plugin (why bother?), so I truly cannot say if APT is better, faster, cheaper, or in any way ‘superior’ to their competition. All I can say that it does its job reliably well according to my needs, and that’s all that matters to me!</p>
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    <p>Tech support, even on the (free) support section for the WP plugin, is, generally speaking, quite reasonable. While it might not be ‘instantaneous’, the APT team are at least willing to listen to any issue that their users may have with APT, and provide a quick fix in a reasonable timeframe. They’re not the kind of ‘deaf’ developers that pretend to assume that ‘everything is fine’ and therefore ignore their users. Usually, they are responsive enough, most often replying after a fix or patch has been put in place, and the result of a months-long thread listing difficulties with APT will grab their attention quickly enough, assign a team member to immediately work on a patch, and get it out as fast as possible. Sometimes, it takes much longer than predicted; but at the very least you have the guarantee that they will be working at a solution and release it rather soon than later.</p>
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    <p>Naturally, no software is perfect or ‘complete’, and I have my wishlist for APT as well. At the top of my own feature requests would be the ability to run APT from the WP-CLI, where it can be automated easily enough for long-running (bulk) tasks, such as going through the whole website and change each and every file in there. Some tools (such as the built-in search-and-replace subsystem) already can do that, and I’m sure it will be just a question of time until such a feature gets developed and added to the (already big!) source code.</p>
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    <p>APT has no issues with WP multisite or translated content (either using WPML, Polylang, or any similar plugin) and is fully prepared to deal with those as well.</p>
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    • This topic was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by Gwyneth Llewelyn. Reason: (converting from classic to blocks)
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