Plain Unstrucutred HTML Content Types, How to Pull image from them in Views
you will need to only create one view theme. That will be a theme for the BODY field of your node. It's actually super simple.


create a PHP file in your theme folder called views-view-field--YOURVIEWNAME--body.tpl.php 
your file has one variable you need to worry about, $output and that's the HTML. Write your PHP code to isolate the very first image tag and then this site has a nice example of how to do that


I think the code in this file would end up looking like this

  $first_img = '';
  $numMatches = preg_match_all('/&lt;img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*&gt;/i', $output, $matches);
  if($numMatches){
    $first_img = $matches [1] [0];
  }else{ //Defines a default image
    $first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
  }
  echo '&lt;img src="' . $first_img . '" alt="thumbnail" class="thumb"/&gt;';



add some CSS to make the thumbnail, or alternatively you can use theme with imagecache I think.
refresh your template cache


You're done!