I did my homework reading up on thumbnails and excerpts, but I need a little help...

Here's what I want:

• Lead picture (thumbnail/featured image) on the main page that's linked to the full post
• Length of excerpt on the main page controlled by the "more" tag (or some other way that's not a fixed length).

I can make this work by selecting the "featured image" for the post and then dropping the excerpt in the "manual excerpt" box, right?

If that's the case, a couple of questions:

• Do the theme "thumbnail settings" override the "picture settings" set within the post for picture formatting?
• Is there a way to display 2 or more images with the excerpt (besides siamese-ing them into 1 file)?

I think the easiest and most straight forward approach is the following.

• Create your post with whatever images you want
• Go to HTML view and copy the HTML of what you want to show in the excerpt including the pictures
• Paste the copied code into the manual excerpt box
• The pictures will be sized to the dimension set in thumbnail settings for the excerpt but will show as the size you put them in the post after click the read more.
• There is an interplay between the Atahualpa and WordPress thumbnail settings so if you have any issues take a look there.

The pictures will be sized to the dimension set in thumbnail settings for the excerpt but will show as the size you put them in the post after click the read more.

Really? It'll resize any image that's part of the excerpt? And set their link to go to the full post?
...because if that's true, that's really awesome.

Are thumbnails only sized down, or will they be sized up to the maximum in the thumbnail settings?

In general, we tend to run big pictures on the main page (not a lot of rapid-fire content), right up to our 720px wide fixed width. Of course, not all available pictures are that big, so sometimes we run 600 or whatever.

Would a 600px wide image be resized to 720 if I make the thumbnail "box" 720?

I know I could figure a lot of this out by trying it out, but the site's live full time and I don't have a practice/sandbox blog to do testing on.

The images themselves won't auto link to the post but you could set the link to do that when you create the post.

I just went into my test and sized the post image to a small size and it still shows as the now larger thumbnail size so it seems to work both ways.

You really shouldn't upload a 600px image and have the thumbnail set to 720px though as you will lose quality. I would upload a 1000px image and insert it into the post as the size you want it to show when people see the full post and let the thumbnail be sized down to 720px. I say 1000px as that is the size I upload many pictures to give me freedom to play around.

Originally Posted by lmilesw

I just went into my test and sized the post image to a small size and it still shows as the now larger thumbnail size so it seems to work both ways.

You really shouldn't upload a 600px image and have the thumbnail set to 720px though as you will lose quality...

...that's exactly why I asked if it up-sized as well, trying to avoid smaller pictures ending up pixelated. Unfortunately, we end up running a lot of found images* that are smaller.

*My site is a car blog, largely focusing on the rarer/stranger segments of the automotive universe. We run a lot of posts on ebay/craigslist finds, and the images from there are frequently small and crappy.

Originally Posted by lmilesw

The images themselves won't auto link to the post but you could set the link to do that when you create the post.

Hmmm...but I could do that manually already with the full post and "more" tag. (set the link URL to the URL of the full post). What I'm looking for a is a default/automatic way to make it easy for the above-the-jump image to be a link to the full post.

...what I'm really tempted to do is go edit the code for the image placement dialog so that "Post URL" goes sets the link to the full post URL, not that maddeningly useless "attachment" page.

What do you mean by the "maddeningly useless "attachment" page"?

In the dialog where you set the image properties (size, left/right/none justification, etc) there are 3 options for or what the Link goes to
"None" = image is not a link
"Image URL" = clicking on image takes you directly to image file (http://{URL}/coolcar.jpg)
"Post URL" = clicking on image takes you to a blog-post looking page that contains the image in medium size, with a link set to the image file URL.

It loads the full "post" interface with comments and everything. This is of no use to me or my readers, as if they want to see a bigger version of an image that's a 150x150 thumbnail (common definition, not WP's), they don't want to go to a yet another page where they have to click on the image yet again to get to the file. Hence, useless. Maddeningly so.

Thanks... That is kinda useless.

I'm gonna continue my own threadjack here to see if anyone can weigh in.

I've decided to see if I can tweak the code that controls the picture link options so that clicking "Post URL" makes it link to the Post's permalink.

I've burrowed all the way down in in "wp-admin/includes/media.php". The code that controls those buttons is this:

PHP Code:

function image_link_input_fields($post, $url_type = '') {

    $file = wp_get_attachment_url($post->ID);
    $link = get_attachment_link($post->ID);

    if ( empty($url_type) )
        $url_type = get_user_setting('urlbutton', 'post');

    $url = '';
    if ( $url_type == 'file' )
        $url = $file;
    elseif ( $url_type == 'post' )
        $url = $link;

    return "
    <input type='text' class='text urlfield' name='attachments[$post->ID][url]' value='" . esc_attr($url) . "' /><br />
    <button type='button' class='button urlnone' title=''>" . __('None') . "</button>
    <button type='button' class='button urlfile' title='" . esc_attr($file) . "'>" . __('File URL') . "</button>
    <button type='button' class='button urlpost' title='" . esc_attr($link) . "'>" . __('Post URL') . "</button>
";
} 


If I can get

$link = get_attachment_link($post->ID);

to return the permalink of the post, then that should do it.

I tried:

$link = get_permalink($post_id);

but that doesn't work. How do I pass the permalink of the post to $link?