Remove Featured Image on Posts

http://coloreddiamondguide.com/collector-fancy-yellow-radiant-with-strong-white-fluorescence/

Hi,

I would like to remove the featured image in the template for posts so that it doesn’t show up on my blogpost.

Instead, I want to add in the image during the writing of the posts. This is because every of my featured image size is different and having it auto-resized to fill up the width is going to cause poor resolution problems for me.

However, during the post creation, I still want to set a featured image. The reason being that I want it the thumbnail to show up in my “Posts” widget as seen in the footer of the website.

So, I need to configure it such that I still have a featured image on the backend. The only thing is that, I want to prevent it showing up on the actual posts (the one that has a magnifying glass when moused over) that readers read.

How should i go about doing this?

paul