I rescued a fishing blog that had disappeared, and brought more than 1,000 posts back to life.
Then I looked at the restored posts as a list, and noticed a problem. The thumbnail image for every single post, the one WordPress calls the “featured image”, was blank. All white.
This is the story of how I fixed more than a thousand of those featured images with zero manual work, together with my AI partner Kuro (Claude).
What a featured image actually is
A featured image is the picture that becomes the face of a post. It is the little thumbnail that shows up next to or above the title in your blog’s post list, and the one that appears when someone shares the post on social media.
When it is there, a reader glances at it and thinks, “Oh, this one looks interesting.” When it is blank, the list looks bare, and people are less likely to click.
My restored posts had photos inside the body text, properly in place. It was only the featured image that had never been set. Given how the rescue worked, that was unavoidable. The posts came back, but that one setting did not come back with them.
How many days would this take by hand?
Then a very simple piece of arithmetic made me put my head in my hands.
There were more than 1,000 restored posts. If I set the featured image on each one by hand, the loop would be: open the post, pick an image, set it, save, move to the next. Say I got fast enough to do one post per minute. A thousand posts is a thousand minutes. That is over sixteen hours without a single break.
It was not realistic. Not even close.
So I asked Kuro. “Is there any way to set the featured images on 1,000 posts all at once?”
A tool that takes the first image in the body
What Kuro came back with was a way of thinking about the problem, not a way of grinding through it.
Your restored posts already have images inside the body text. So if you use a tool that automatically sets the first image in the body as the featured image, you can process all 1,000 in one go. There is a plugin that does exactly that: XO Featured Image Tools.
That made sense to me immediately.
I did not need to sit there for each post wondering “which picture should I use for this one?” I could just hand over a rule: use the first image in the body. A job that would be numbing for a human is instant once you give a tool the rule to follow.
1,124 posts in, 973 came out with a face
I installed the plugin and ran the bulk setting.
Out of 1,124 posts, 973 got their featured image set automatically, just like that. The remaining 151 were posts that had no image anywhere in the body text. There was nothing to pull from, so nothing could be done about those.
Put the other way around: every post that had a picture in it now had a face on it. That was more than enough for me.
Separating “what a person does” from “what a tool does”
What this job made me feel again is that working with AI opens up an option you might not see otherwise, which is not doing the manual work at all.
At first I had convinced myself there was no choice. A thousand posts, one at a time, and that’s just how it is, how depressing. Manual labour was the only thing in my head.
But because I talked it over with Kuro, a completely different solution came out: automatically use the first image in the body. Something that should have been hours of drudgery was finished in a few minutes.
When you run into a big pile of identical tasks and you catch yourself thinking, “wait, am I really going to do all of this by hand?”, that might be the signal to go and ask AI. Just asking “is there a way to do this in bulk?” is often enough to get a tool or a shortcut handed back to you.
And then you get to spend your own time on the things that actually matter. Writing posts. Going fishing.
Related reading
If you want the earlier part of this story, I wrote about bringing that white, broken blog back in how I restored a blog I had given up on, and about digging the lost posts themselves out of the archive in recovering lost posts with the Wayback Machine.
