Oh I just hate those generated thumbs done by WordPress. Not only do the litter my media library and devour space, but also at some point they become messed up and in a while I get missing images in some posts. Of course I am not planning on spending so much money like you’ve mentioned. I try to keep things simple 🙂

I’ve tried a few plugins, they all give the same result. About copyrights issues – all images are legit, my aim is to reduce server load. I’m using http://cloudinary.com/ service. It’s a great service providing compression and CDN for your files (there is also a free plan), so instead of hosting your images on your local server, you can host them on the cloud server. In such a way you gain point in page speed, in cache and in server load time (noting that the Newspaper theme uses Lazy Load as well). If you are putting an image in your post, I recommend using this service. In my case, I want the featured image to be loaded from an external URL. Maybe eventually I will find something.

This plugin take the first image from the post, I’m talking about using external URL as featured image. Any workaround?