is there a chance to disallow facebook to crawl a specific image as post thumbnail? I know the og:image possibility, but in case there is no og:image specified on the page, the crawler will looking for an alternatively image by itselfs. This is a bit annoying, because not in all cases the selected image is a good choice.
Regards,
Tim
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We use the Facebook Share option on a website with newsarticles. The website is build with PHP and uses Smarty. We generate a unique URL (stripped like /news/headline-of-the-article) and have the meta properties defined.
When the owner shares a links with an image that was previously uploaded, everything is fine. When he uploads a news image, inserts it into the article and shares, Facebook takes another pictures, the pictures that it finds first on the source-code. Altho, in the preview-box just before you publish, it shows the correct image. Once placed, it's the wrong one.
The Facebook Debug Tool shows as og:image tag > og:image domain/UserFiles/images/news/standard_14.jpg
But when I look at the RAW tags og:image shows > domain/UserFiles/images/news/bosuil_1.jpg
So the og:image tag does it job and generates the correct URL, but facebook still posts the wrong image. When I force Facebook (manually) to scrape again, it shows everything good and also shares it correct.
I don't get it...
I had the same problem and found these best practices on facebook's developer wiki: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#precaching
Use og:image:width and og:image:height Open Graph tags
Using these tags will specify the image dimensions to the crawler so that it can
render the image immediately without having to asynchronously download
and process it.
After specifying the width and height we have not had a problem with facebook crawling the right picture immediately.
I just recently launched a game on steam, and when I share a link in facebook the preview image doesn't appear.
I ran the object debugger.
From the results, in the og:image field, I can see the image correctly, however in the preview itself the image is broken.
Any ideas?
Edit: Since this is a steam page, my ability to influence it is limited. I can only change some images, but I cannot add meta tags.
I did find, however, in this post, that a <link rel="image_src" href="/myimage.jpg"/> tag should also be identifiable by facebook as a preview image. For some reason in my page facebook either ignores this or treats the image as invalid (although it is larger than 200x200)
og:image could not be downloaded or is too small
og:image was not defined, could not be downloaded or was not big enough.
Please define a chosen image using the og:image metatag, and use an image
that's at least 200x200px and is accessible from Facebook.
'http://store.akamai.steamstatic.com/public/images/game/game_highlight_image_spacer.gif' will be used instead.
Consult http://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler for more troubleshooting tips.
So we do have the reason why it is blank (spacer.gif is blank)
This is the same for other pages as well...
http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/455980/header.jpg?t=1459222551 <-- Can be found in the header...
So lets have a closer look at the image itself...
The images are creatd ondemand (so it seems) and you (a.jpg) is the same as Cities Skylines (b.jpg)
So no idea at all... Maybe a problem with Steam's CDN (FB is unable to find the image. Did you update the image recently?)
Sorry not to be able to help. The image itself cannot be faulty IMHO as stream is processing the image every time...
Cannot say more :/
When content is shared for the first time, the Facebook crawler will scrape and cache the metadata from the URL shared. The crawler has to see an image at least once before it can be rendered. This means that the first person who shares a piece of content won't see a rendered image:
Pre-cache the image with the URL Debugger
Run the URL through the URL debugger to pre-fetch metadata for the page. You should also do this if you update the image for a piece of content.
Use og:image:width and og:image:height Open Graph tags
Using these tags will specify the image to the crawler so that it can render it immediately without having to asynchronously.
Source: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#images
When the og:image tag is not defined facebook searches for other images available on the page. I need to tell facebook no to use any images if the og:image tag is not there.
That isn't a feature, Facebook's crawler will always try to find the best image if you don't specify one
One of the problems I face while sharing a link of my blogger post on facebook or linkedin is that the thumbnail shared is my picture (which is the only picture on the page). I would prefer no thumbnail being shared.I tried using
<meta property="og:image" content=""
I.e the content is kept as blank, yet it shows a thumbnail. How do i set it to no picture?
You can't. Facebook/Linkedin will crawl your site and decide on it's own what images to offer the user. The og:image meta tag is just a suggestion and not a directive.
The only way to share without image is for the user to remove it.
Update: there is another way. You could detect (on the server) FB/LinkedIns crawler and serve them HTML that does not contain any images. That way they wouldn't have anything to display (just text). I don't know if that's possible on blogger. And if you go down this path, check FB/LinkedIn's TOS if this is allowed (doing this with google, for instance, will get you banned).
If no og:image or link rel=”image_src“ is given, Facebook tries to guess the thumbnail image for the article url by scraping the html for images.
Is there any way to prevent Facebook from doing this?
What I'm basically trying to achieve is to have my articles shared on Facebook without any images.
(I know it's a rather unusual question, but I definitely don't want to provide any og:image or link rel=”image_src“ meta information.)
This isn't exactly what you're asking for but have you considered specifying either one of those tags and providing a URL to a spacer image (1x1px with a transparent or white background)?