Listing thumbnails
Show them at all
Customize → Blog → Display post thumbnail on blog. On by default. Untick for a text-only listing.
A post with no featured image simply has none; the layout closes up around it. Mixing posts with and without images looks fine in stacked, uneven in list, and poor in grid — a grid of cards where a third have no picture reads as broken.
Thumbnail ratio
Customize → Blog → Thumbnail ratio. The shape every featured image in the listing is cropped to.
| Choice | |
|---|---|
| Default (per display mode) | Each display keeps its own crop: uncropped stacked, 3/2 list, 16/10 grid |
| Original (uncropped) | No crop anywhere — every image keeps its own shape |
| Wide (16/9) | |
| Landscape (3/2), (4/3), (5/4) | |
| Square (1/1) | |
| Portrait (4/5), (3/4), (2/3) |
Cropping is done by the browser, not by WordPress — your original file is never touched, and changing the ratio takes effect immediately with no regeneration.
One shape is what makes a grid look deliberate. If you take one thing from
this page: on the grid display, pick a ratio. 1/1 or 4/5 for photography,
16/9 or 3/2 for anything else.
Original (uncropped) is the opposite choice — a ragged, Pinterest-ish column where each image keeps its own proportions. It is honest and it suits a photography journal on the stacked display; in a grid it produces rows of wildly different heights.
Border, colour and corners
Customize → Design → Blog → Thumbnail.
| Setting | Choices |
|---|---|
| Border | None (default), Hairline 1px, Medium 2px, Thick 3px, Heavy 4px |
| Border color | Empty follows Design → General → Border colour |
| Corner radius | Square (default), 4px, 8px, 12px, 16px, 24px, Circle (50%) |
Past about 4px a border stops reading as a frame and starts reading as a mistake, which is why the scale stops there.
Circle is the odd one out and is meant to be: on a square crop it makes a round thumbnail, which a lot of blogs want; on any other ratio it makes an ellipse.
These reach the block editor too
Every setting under Design → Blog styles the matching post block as well as the theme’s own listing. A Query Loop you assemble on a page picks up the same title font, meta font, excerpt colour, thumbnail border and radius — so a hand-built section and the built-in archive look like one theme rather than two.
Image sizes and performance
The theme tells the browser how wide each thumbnail will actually be drawn, worked out from the layout, the display mode and the grid column count. A four-column grid therefore downloads a quarter-width file rather than a full-viewport one.
You do not need to configure this. If you are building something unusual in a
child theme, the rural_blog_thumbnail_sizes filter is documented under
Hooks and filters.
Upload featured images at around 1400px wide; WordPress generates the smaller sizes it needs from that.