Hi,
Thank you for the suggestion, however I’m not sure its what I’m looking for and it seems the documentation is only open to members!
I have tried a number of plugins that let you set the featured image, some from the first image, however all of them thus far take the selected image and actually make it the featured image meaning it appears large and proud at the top of my post as well as where it is supposed to be!
In some of the other Recent post plugins they do it but I don’t like the resulting layouts e.g.
Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails
The thumbnails will be built from the featured image of a post or of the first image in the post content. If there is neither a featured image nor a content image then you can define a default thumbnail.