Problem & fix: Use original image proportions instead of hard cropped thumb

Here’s a fix for a problem some other users may run into just as I did.

The showimage="yes" option works nicely for showing uploaded images. It picks the default WordPress-generated thumbnail size. In most versions of WordPress (and sometimes depending on your theme) this is a square, hard cropped, 150×150 image. However, covers usually aren’t square!

There’s an easy fix here. Essentially: Go to Settings > Media and set thumbnail size to what you want. Uncheck “Crop thumbnail to exact dimensions”.

This will fix thumbnails for all images you upload from now on. But if you also want to fix your old ones, you need to rebuild them. You can use a plugin like AJAX Rebuild Images for that, as also described in the post linked above.

Note to @kseaborn: Might be worth adding a note on this in the FAQ as I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what caused the images to come out square when I uploaded them not square.