Only create image size when used in featured image

There is such plugin: Dynamic Image Resizer so you could give it a try. But… it’s old, not maintained since 2012-04-30 so I’m not sure if it still works.

Normally when you upload an image to a WordPress site, it creates
several differently sized versions of the image automatically. Themes
can define custom image sizes as well, increasing the amount of images
generated on your server.

This plugin changes the way WordPress creates images to make it
generate the images only when they are actually used somewhere, on the
fly. Images created thusly will be saved in the normal upload
directories, for later fast sending by the webserver. The result is
that space is saved (since images are only created when needed), and
uploading images is much faster (since it’s not generating the images
on upload anymore).

“Pretty” permalinks must be enabled for this plugin to function.

Note: This plugin does not work on multisite setups, due to the way
WordPress handles file serving in such situations (with ms-files.php).

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