Sorry for the confusion, I figured that you describe the small-height category images as an issue, but if you want them to appear this way, then a code snippet is needed. Preserving the aspect ratio is not the expected behaviour because the portrait image size is set to 400x533px, with cropping. Please use this code snippet to adjust these settings Change size of images in the listing category - #2 by aqmiami7 For example, if you set 400px width and 9999px height, and re-upload the image (changes are applied on re-uploading), WordPress will leave the image height “as is” without cropping it to 533px like it does currently.