Duplicate Images in Feed – Does this Solve?

WordPress Core doesn’t actually add the featured image to posts by default–that’s usually handled by your theme or a plugin. If you have a theme or plugin which is already adding the featured image, this would not remove it, so you would possibly end up with yet another one being added, if you enabled that setting. Send Images to RSS just modifies existing images in the feed; it does not remove any existing images.

It would require some detective work to figure out where your multiple featured images are coming from at this point–some themes automatically add it; some plugins do as well, so you would want to dig through and figure it out. If you don’t know that you have a plugin doing it, it may be the theme, because the plugins should let you know what they’re doing.

If you can share a link to your site, or list your theme/plugins, it may be possible to narrow down where the extra images are coming from, but I would not advise adding a new plugin into the mix at this point.

Hi Robin, thanks for the quick response. I have your plugin enabled in my beta environment. Would it help if I changed my Read Settings to Summary, then let your plugin handle adding my featured image; thus only (1) image would be shown? Here’s a link

There are duplicate images in the staging feed, so no, I don’t think that will solve the issue. One image looks like it’s coming from the plugin; I don’t know how the other is being added. I don’t think that’s part of the default setup of your theme, but your theme could have been customized to include the featured image, or it could be coming from another plugin.

Since you have a staging site set up, you could try troubleshooting there to find the source of the extra image. You can change to a different theme and then check the feed. If the duplicate images are gone, it’s likely that the theme includes custom code to add the image there. If they’re still there, you can try deactivating plugins to see which one is adding the image.

Troubleshooting a raw RSS feed is a pain in the neck, I know–the easiest way is to do a Ctrl/Cmd + F and search the feed output for img. It looks like your feed is set up to show the 20 most recent posts, so you want to find only 20 img, since they’re set to show just the summary–right now there are 40. Hope this helps you get started–

Thanks for the communication on it. My theme author just emailed to confirm they are not adding anything, and it’s the WordPress default RSS feed in play. I’ll do some more troubleshooting today and ping you back. Is there a better way to reach you, or should I just post my findings here?

You can continue this thread if you like, or contact me directly through my site.

One option to consider is that if you deactivate Send Images to RSS and just use Summaries in your feed, your duplicate issue may be solved–wherever the other image is coming from, you can keep using it, and just not try to fix the issue with this plugin, as long as you’re okay with the images as they are, however they’re being added.

Thanks Robin. Will do.