Do not worry, the thumbnails will not disappear. If you remove the plugin the premium license will be deleted such as plugin settings. But you can configure APT if you want to save recent settings after plugin removing.

Open in the dashboard Auto Post Thumbnails => Settings, find the line Delete settings when removing the plugin, by default is Off. So, if you would like to save the plugin settings after removing, do not change anything. If you want the settings to be deleted click On.

No, this action will not affect the performance of the plugin as a whole. But you will not be able to use one of the most popular APT option – Selecting a featured image from the post images on the posts list page.

Sure! Images stored in photo stocks are distributed by Creative Commons license. Photographers and designers upload their works on sites for free.

Featured image can’t be generated if there isn’t any image inside the post. Check the post again. It’s necessary for generating to contain at least one image in the post. The plugin generates a featured image automatically selecting it from the image inside the post. Upload a suitable image to the media library, add it to the post and update it – the  featured image will be set automatically.

Indeed, we disabled the featured image generation by default. Usually editors have their own opinion about how to create post. One group of users prefer to generate featured image by default, another group is trying to set thumbnail independently to avoid confusion. That’s why we disabled automatic generation by default. You can enable this feature on the dashboard: Open Auto Post Thumbnails => Settings, find the line Enable automatic post thumbnail generation there and push the On button.