mbecher

If your theme supports the thumbnail feature introduced in WordPress 2.9, this plugin will display attached thumbnails on the admin area’s manage posts and manage pages screen, similar to the media management page.

Admin Thumbnails

If your theme supports Wordpress 2.9's thumbnail feature, this plugin displays thumbnails on the admin area's manage posts and manage pages  …

Stanislav Khromov

This plugin enables upscaling of thumbnails for small media attachments. The default behaviour of WordPress is to not upscale small images, which means 
you are never guaranteed a certain size for a thumbnail format. This plugin corrects that and upscales small images to the specified thumbnail dimensions. 
This is beneficial in grid layouts where images of different sizes can make the grid malfunction.
<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/thumbnail-upscale/screenshots/" rel="ugc">Check screenshots for an example!</a>
Important: Your thumbnails format must have the crop setting enabled to be processed by this plugin.
Usage
After you have enabled Thumbnail Upscale plugin, all your future uploaded images will be upscaled. 
For existing images, install and run <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/force-regenerate-thumbnails/" rel="ugc">Force Regenerate Thumbnails</a> 
This will upscale your existing media images!
<h3>Requirements</h3>
<ul>
<li>PHP 5.2 or higher strongly recommended</li>
</ul>
<h3>Translations</h3>
None. The plugin has no translateable strings.

Thumbnail Upscale

Whaaaaat? You don't use this plugin? It's good.

It’s still relevant god damn it

Enables upscaling of thumbnails for small media attachments

Admin Thumbnails vs Thumbnail Upscale