WordPress widgets allow you to add static and dynamic content to widget ready areas of your theme such as your sidebar, header and footer. It allows you to display post titles, author names, post dates, comment counts, post excerpts, and post thumbnails. It supports post thumbnails and it allows you to change the order of items. Additional meta information such as comments, date, and post excerpt, can also be displayed.

And so given the importance of post thumbnails, we thought we would go over 15 elegant free wordpress post thumbnail widgets that might help you get even more out of this powerful and attention-grabbing feature. Don’t forget to give your most welcomed feedback to improve quality of our blog. You may want to take a look at the following related articles: Premium Timeline WordPress Themes, Free Statistics Plugins for WordPress, Free Church WordPress Themes 2014 and Email Newsletter Widgets for WordPress.

1. Extended Featured Widget

The Extended Featured Content Widget is a powerful, light weight wordpress widget. You can decide, whether or not the post thumbnail is displayed, whether the post title, post info, meta, content etc are above or beneath the thumbnail and a couple of more things.

Extended Featured Widget

2. Post Thumbnail Extras

Provides a shortcode for embedding post-thumbnails. Authors can quickly change pictures in posts without wading through HTML. This can be awesome in several ways: if your post-thumbnails change the width or height due to a theme change.

Post Thumbnail Extras

3. Post Thumbnail Editor

To meet the needs of themes where the post-thumbnails have random and capricious sizes (which causes wordpress to crop images simply from the middle this plugin attempts to give the users an interface to manually fix those thumbnail and random images.

Post Thumbnail Editor

4. Dynamic Featured Image

Dynamically adds multiple featured image or multiple post thumbnail functionality to your page, posts and custom post types. This plugin provides you an interface to add any number of featured image as you want without writing a single code.

Dynamic Featured Image

5. Instant Featured Image

This plugin solves this problem by adding a new button alongside the “Insert into post” button in the media manager modal. When clicked, this button will insert your selected media and then, if you have selected an image, set that image as the post’s featured image.

Instant Featured Image

6. Admin Featured Thumbnail

Admin Featured Thumbnail WordPress plugin can Add featured image thumbnail to WordPress admin columns. It will help you easy to know which post is attached the featured image. Add click the thumbnail will popup preview the full image.

Admin Featured Thumbnail

7. SB RSS Feed Plus

Add post thumbnail to each post’s excerpt and full text (if enabled in WordPress configuration). Image will be added just before text of each post in RSS feed. Post thumbnail is also added as media:content and enclosure tag to RSS feed.

SB RSS Feed Plus

8. Feature A Page Widget

Feature A Page Widget aims to provide a “just works” solution for showcasing a Page in any sidebar. It leverages Core WordPress features, a simple set of options with a thought-through UI including three widget layouts.

Feature A Page Widget

9. Related Posts by Taxonomy

Display related posts as thumbnails, links, excerpts or as full posts with a widget or shortcode. Posts with the most terms in common will display at the top. Use multiple taxonomies and post types to get the related posts.

Related Posts by Taxonomy

10. WordPress Auto Featured Image

This plugin provides you an easy way to set a default thumbnail image for your posts, pages or custom post types. You can select an image from your local machine or media library.

WordPress Auto Featured Image

11. Ultimate Posts Widget

The ultimate widget for displaying posts, custom post types or sticky posts with an array of options to customize the display. Designed for both the average user and developer, Ultimate Posts Widgets aims to provide flexibility and ease of use for displaying any kinds of posts within your widget areas.

Ultimate Posts Widget

12. External URL To Post Thumbnail

This plugin allow you to extract image from external url and save into your own wordpress media library and set the featured image of post. This also save you steps to download the image to local computer and upload again to your own wordpress.

External URL To Post Thumbnail

13. WK URL 2 WP Thumb

This plugin let you add a featured image to a post using external URL. You can use images from Flickr, google images etc just in one click. No need to download the image and re-upload it again. The image will be processed and thumbnails will be generated just like if you uploaded the image your self from your PC.

WK URL 2 WP Thumb

14. Require Featured Image

Requires your various post types – as specified in a simple options page – to have a featured image set before they can be published. If a lack of featured images causes your layout to break, or just look less-than-optimal, this is the plugin for you.

Require Featured Image

15. WP Fake Image Replacer

With WP Fake Image Replacer you don’t need to upload pictures. Just use the_post_thumbnail() function wherever you want and the plugin auto generate a fake image holder. Just change the thumbnail size whenever you want and the plugin generates automatically a new fake image.

WP Fake Image Replacer