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

fahrirusliyadi

WordPress generates thumbnails in the same directory with the original image. This plugin change this behavior by generating the thumbnails in a separate directory. The thumbnails will only be generated when they are needed and has not been generated.
This plugin will only move the thumbnails location for new uploaded images. To move all thumbnails, you need to delete all existing thumbnails (see FAQ).

Fr Thumbnails Folder

Move thumbnails file location to {$upload_path}/thumbnails or {$upload_path}/sites/{$blog_id}/thumbnails for multisite.

Thumbnail Upscale vs Fr Thumbnails Folder