One Crayon

Markup to Featured Image will automatically generate a featured image when you publish a post, with the intent of allowing you to publish posts with featured images from third-party clients like MarsEdit.
To add a featured image to your post, include one of the following markup variants in your post’s content:
<pre><code><img src="/path/to/image.jpg" data-featured-image="keep" />
<img src="/path/to/image.jpg" data-featured-image="strip" />

</code></pre>
If you use an <code><img></code> element, the values of the <code>data-featured-image</code> attribute specify whether the image should be displayed when the post is shown on your site (<code>keep</code>) or ignored when the post is displayed (<code>strip</code>). The order of attributes in your <code><img></code> tag (and whether you include other attributes, like width/height, title, alt, etc.) doesn’t matter. You can make it as complicated or simple as you like.
If the post already has a featured image, the plugin will do nothing (version 1.0 does not allow updating the thumbnail by updating the markup).

Markup to Featured Image

Automatically set the featured image (formerly the post thumbnail) for a post based on custom markup in the body text.

Samuel Aguilera

NOTE: This plugin functionality is guaranteed by more than 10,000 active installs. But before installing this plugin bear in mind that its only purpose is to ADD the feature image ID to your post (in the same way that you would do using WP editor), it does not remove ANYTHING after deactivation. 
Before asking for support please read <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-add-thumbnail/faq/" rel="ugc">FAQ</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/topic/please-read-before-posting-4" rel="ugc">this support thread</a>
<h4>How it works?</h4>
Checks if the post (any post type with thumbnail support, including pages) has already a featured image associated, and if not sets it using one of the following methods:
<ol>
<li>
Dynamically, for old published posts, the featured images are set only when needed to show them in the frontend. This means that the featured image is set (only first time) when a visitor loads the page where it needs to be shown.
</li>
<li>
For new content, the featured image is set in the publishing process.
</li>
</ol>
No options page to setup, simply install and activate.
If you want to exclude certain post type (e.g. pages), you can do it by using a filter. See <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-add-thumbnail/faq/" rel="ugc">FAQ</a> for more details.
Easy Add Thumbnail doesn’t add any plugin data to your WordPress database. It simply adds the _thumbnail_id meta key with the ID of the attachment to be used as feature image (just the same that WordPress does when you set it manually).
Therefore it requires to have attached/uploaded at least one image to the post. If there’s not any image attached to the post, this plugin can’t help you.
Easy Add Thumbnail has not any control over how/when/where your featured image is displayed in your site, the display of the featured image in your site is TOTALLY controlled by your theme, this includes size, position, display it or not…
<h4>Requirements</h4>
<ul>
<li>WordPress 4.7 or higher.</li>
<li>PHP 5.6 or higher.</li>
</ul>

Easy Add Thumbnail

Automatically sets the featured image to the first image uploaded into the post (any post type with thumbnail support). So easy like that...

Markup to Featured Image vs Easy Add Thumbnail