Need plugin that allows me to used custom thumbnail instead of featured image

Hello,

My goal is to have my recent posts with thumbnails listed on my homepage. I am running into difficulties because I have embedded youtube videos so when I st a featured image it is redundant and i don’t need it on my post page. When I used the hide featured image plugin, I still have a weird shorter box that shows post information on the page and overlaps part of my page. There must be a way to just set my desired thumbnail instead of an intrusive featured image?

thanks in advance!