How to Create a WordPress Featured Image or Thumbnail using Photopea

A featured image or thumbnail is a primary image of your post. Depending on the theme design, it often displayed on top of your post or next to the post heading. It is recommended to include a featured image for your post as we human then to find visual context much more engaging. The featured post in iBodhi was created using Photopea, for example 第三世多杰羌佛办公室 第四十号公告 post. Hence, in this post, we are going to learn how to create a thumbnail by using Photopea

Photopea is an online photo editor that run on web browser. The good thing about Photopea is it’s free and portable because it is run on web browser. It offer many image editing function which is sufficient for normal image editing. Photopea is chosen as the tool for creating WordPress post’s featured image because it has a library of photo templates, which make creating the thumbnail image easier. In this tutorial, we are going to use the sample image from Photopea, you can use your photo as well but it is not covered in this tutorial.

Steps on creating WordPress Featured Image or Thumbnail using Photopea

First, Open Photopea (click here)

Now we want to select a photo for our post thumbnail. Go to the top-left corner of photopea. Select File -> New. A New Project window will appear.

For WordPress thumbnail, choose FB Shared Image 1200 x 630 px.

Now you can start searching image. If you are only interested in templates with photo only, you can uncheck the With Symbols and it will only shows the templates with photo. Then, key in the image you’re interested in Keyword text field (e.g. Nature). It will start showing the image related to Nature. Select the one you desired and it will open up the templates and ready for edit.
NOTE: It is recommended to select the templates with the text positioned in the center of the image as WordPress will crop the featured image into square size for thumbnail (Subjected to theme design/settings)

To modify the text in the templates, double click the text and type your desired text.

For Chinese characters, we need to select the font that support Chinese character which is Unicode encoding. If the inserted text is displayed as squares box (☒☒☒☒☒), this mean the selected font does not support Chinese characters. First, you need to highlight the text, click the font to display the dropdown menu, tick Chi-Jap-Kor to display only fonts that support Chinese-Japanese-Korean characters. Select the desired font (Recommended Source Han Sans for Chinese characters). After you changed, you should be able to see your Chinese characters.

You can change the font size of your text by highlighting your text and adjust the size on the top bar. It is recommended to split your text to multiple lines if it does not fit inside the box

If you would like to remove the secondary (smaller) text, you can delete or hide the layer in Layers Menu

To move the text to the center of the black box, click the Move Tool icon and move the text until you see the red cross appear

Once you have done with your featured image, you can save the image by going File -> Export as -> JPG (recommended as it is smaller in size). Click Save and it will be downloaded into your browser download directory.

Once you downloaded the image, you can upload the image as featured post.