Related posts not from first picture

Hi there, @istok,

Thanks for contacting us – that’s a good question. The issue is that Jetpack Related Posts uses the first image in your post content when no Featured Image is set. Since your QR code appears first, it gets selected as the thumbnail.

To fix that, one solution to test is to set a Featured Image for each post: this takes priority over images in the content.

Since you mentioned legal concerns about saving YouTube thumbnails, you can consider these two options:

• Use a third-party plugin like Featured Image from URL, which this lets you use the YouTube thumbnail URL as your Featured Image without downloading it to your server.
• Create a generic “video” placeholder image to use as the Featured Image across your video posts.

Either approach will make Related Posts use your Featured Image instead of the QR code, while keeping the QR code visible in your post content where you need it.

Let us know how it goes, and if you have any questions 🙂

Hey @istok,

I am sorry to hear the FIFU alternative didn’t work out. You’re still welcome to experiment with some other options below:

1. Move the QR code out of post content. Instead of adding the QR code as an image directly in your post content, you could:

• Display it via a shortcode or widget in your theme template
• Store it in a custom field and display it separately (Jetpack doesn’t scan custom fields for Related Posts thumbnails)
• Place it after the <!--more--> tag or at the very end of your post

This way, Jetpack should detect your YouTube embed first and automatically use its thumbnail, which is the behaviour you’re seeing on your WordPress.com site.

2. Use an alternative Related Posts plugin (but keep Jetpack active so you can use all the other features). If restructuring your content isn’t practical, you could try a different related posts plugin that may have better compatibility with FIFU, such as Contextual Related Posts or Related Posts for WordPress

3. Use a custom code filter. Jetpack does offer filters to customize Related Posts thumbnails. You can see an example here:
https://developer.jetpack.com/hooks/jetpack_relatedposts_filter_thumbnail_size/

A developer (or yourself) could potentially build a custom filter to pull the FIFU URL instead, similar other ones in the link above. However, writing custom code falls outside the scope of our support, so we wouldn’t be able to assist with that directly.

Let us know if any of these will work!

Hi there, @istok,

I see where this is coming from, and I wish we could help you further. I am afraid that suggesting the filter options is the best we can do at the moment. You’re also very welcome to issue a feature request to have our product team consider a stronger solution for that 🙂

Hope that helps! Let me know if there’s anything else we can do to help.

Hey @istok,

Thanks for creating the feature request. I took the liberty to add some more context for our developers – give it a look and let me know if I’m missing something.

To clarify: “filters” in WordPress are snippets of PHP code that developers add to customise how plugins behave. They’re not a setting you can click on, and they don’t relate to image size.

Using filters requires editing your theme’s functions.php file or using a code snippets plugin, which is why I mentioned it’s beyond our scope of support. We can point you to the documentation, but can’t write or troubleshoot custom code.

If you’re interested in exploring that route, you’d want to hire a developer or ask in a WordPress development community.

Hope this helps!