How to get post thumbnail to be equal to set media size

Question

I'm new to learning WP theme development so I may not have worded the title perfectly but that's the best way I could think to explain it.

My theme is on a localhost so I can't link to it but here is a screenshot: https://i.stack.imgur.com/TjJ2j.png

What I want is for the_post_thumbnail to always fill the specified thumbnail media settings.

Currently the thumbnails will be different sizes depending on the width / height ratio.

I have gone into WP Dashboard and set the media thumbnail size for medium at 250px wide by 150px tall. I want the image to always fill that space, don't care if it's cut off but I want it to be that size.

Thanks, I hope I explained it correctly.

Answer 1

the_post_thumbnail allows for size specificiations. So you would do:

<?php the_post_thumbnail('medium'); ?>

if you changed the image dimensions in the admin, you will need to go back and re-upload the images so they crop to the correct size that you set up

If the issue is the dimensions of the image you are probably looking for a hard-crop. The best bet is to set up a new image size with add_image_size in your functions.php.

add_image_size( 'new-image-name', 250, 150, true );

then re-uploading images then

<?php the_post_thumbnail('new-image-name'); ?>