Does anyone know how to give the user the option to choose between multiple images when sharing a page on Facebook?
I've used an url like the one below in the past. The images param would be
p[images][0]=...&p[images][1]=...
etc. However, it seems that this doesn't work anymore. The user sees the arrows to select the next or previous image with but there is only one image to choose from.
Web page
http://occasions.dvangorkum.nl/Land-Rover/Range-Rover-Sport-2.7-/TdV6-HSE-Navigatie-PDC-Climate-Xenon-Luchtvering--1606304/1603/1/11/details.aspx?zoek=&so=gallerij
URL:
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?s=100&p[url]=http%3A%2F%2Foccasions.dvangorkum.nl%2FLand-Rover%2FRange-Rover-Sport-2.7-%2FTdV6-HSE-Navigatie-PDC-Climate-Xenon-Luchtvering--1606304%2F1603%2F1%2F11%2Fdetails.aspx%3Fzoek%3D&p[images][0]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_1.jpg&p[images][1]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_2.jpg&p[images][2]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_3.jpg&p[images][3]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_4.jpg&p[images][4]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_5.jpg&p[images][5]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_6.jpg&p[images][6]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_7.jpg&p[images][7]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_8.jpg&p[images][8]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_9.jpg&p[images][9]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_10.jpg&p[images][10]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_11.jpg&p[images][11]=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.autodealers.nl%2F640%2F1606304_12.jpg&p[title]=++++Land-Rover%C2%A0Range+Rover+Sport+2.7+%C2%A0TdV6+HSE+Navigatie+PDC+Climate+Xenon+Luchtvering+&p[summary]=Occasion+te+koop+aangeboden+Land-Rover+Range+Rover+Sport+2.7++TdV6+HSE+Navigatie+PDC+Climate+Xenon+Luchtvering++uit+2007%2C+187618+km%2C+Diesel%2C+SUV%2C+Automaat%2C+Grijs&so=gallerij
However, it seems that this doesn't work anymore.
Yes, the Share dialog does not accept these parameters any more after a recent change, but will now get all its info about the shared link from the Open Graph meta information embedded in the shared document.
So if you want multiple images the user can chose from, you have to put multiple og:image meta tags into your document. (Be aware that Facebook seems to offer no more than three images to chose from any more, so putting more images in there is pointless.)
For documentation on Open Graph meta information, see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/using-objects/#creating and http://ogp.me/
Related
I'm developing a WordPress site and using the yoast seo plugin to generate an og image on a dynamic page. However, I think this is not related to that. The og image link appears perfectly, but if I click on the share button, no image is included unless I have already clicked on the share button before, or used the facebook developer tool to scrape the page first.
Is this a facebook issue, or a server issue perhaps?
You can avoid this by either getting your content “pre-scraped” by triggering a scrape via API as soon as you publish it, or by specifying the image dimensions via OG meta tags as well.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#precaching:
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
There are two ways to avoid this and have images render on the first Like or Share action:
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.
The second one is probably easier to implement; although you might have to modify your plugin that generates the OG meta tags (or choose a different one) if it doesn’t provide an option to output the image dimensions as well already.
I've seen this is a common issue here on stack but it seems that the answer is always dependent on the specific scenario. I'm looking for a fellow coder to give me that "AHA" moment.
Problem: Ads posted to my website do not show the og:image content when shared to facebook until the ad is shared at least 4 times
I have thought about/ tried the following things
Checking the image size to make sure it's not large (128kb) is the norm. I compress all uploads.
Giving the ad some time to marinate before sharing (perhaps the fb crawler takes a while to cache the page)
I tried using the debug crawler tool on fb to see if I could reproduce the problem and I indeed could.
I tried sharing the ad to my own page regardless of the missing image to see if the image showed up on my wall. It did not.
The image will not show up on ANY shares until someone has clicked on the share icon on an ad at least 4 times. It seems to me like it might be some latency issue on facebook's part.
What could cause og:image to only show on subsequent share clicks?
Edit
Here's a test ad.
https://www.jdmxchange.com/Classifieds/Details/6ae72690-14d8-4bab-b039-3a2d79923794
Reading https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices I found this, which might be just what you're looking for:
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.
This means, if you set the width and height of your og:image with tags, the image will show straight away.
UPDATE
Actually debugging your URL shows like this URL is redirecting to another page, and then another. Which makes me suspect the Facebook crawler is not able to access the actual OG meta tags you're using.
As a random test, I would add OG metatags to that last URL and see if Facebook uses them. But the actual solution would be to use URLs which are actually reachable to FB (no credentials necessary).
I'm developing a WordPress site and using the yoast seo plugin to generate an og image on a dynamic page. However, I think this is not related to that. The og image link appears perfectly, but if I click on the share button, no image is included unless I have already clicked on the share button before, or used the facebook developer tool to scrape the page first.
Is this a facebook issue, or a server issue perhaps?
You can avoid this by either getting your content “pre-scraped” by triggering a scrape via API as soon as you publish it, or by specifying the image dimensions via OG meta tags as well.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#precaching:
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
There are two ways to avoid this and have images render on the first Like or Share action:
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.
The second one is probably easier to implement; although you might have to modify your plugin that generates the OG meta tags (or choose a different one) if it doesn’t provide an option to output the image dimensions as well already.
So, I've searched and searched this site before posting this question -- I know there is a lot of facebook like questions -- but I can't find an answer to mine.
I have a page VERY similar to Mashable.com. They have multiple teaser articles with LIKE buttons next to each. When you click the LIKE button, you see the article thumbnail, and the article description.
I already have this set-up and it works EXCEPT for the thumbnail and description. They are wrong or not showing up at all. How can I make sure these LIKE buttons are pulling the correct thumbnails and descriptions for each of my articles.
(They are not using Open Graph I don't think, because Mashable.com has no facebook meta tags (and even if they did, the meta tags only specify one thumbnail image, and one title, and one link).
Can anyone tell me how to customise the thumbnails and descriptions for each individual news story?
Thank you!
The href in each like button needs to point to the full URL of that article, which needs to have a full set of open graph meta tags.
Run the (article) page through the debugger at http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug to make sure the correct tags are present and being detected by Facebook's crawler.
The crawler will fall back to using tags and other non-Open Graph meta tags if there aren't a full set present, but the behaviour in that case isn't easy to debug, especially in relation to the images.
Mashable's like buttons are pointing at page which do have open graph meta tags by the way, e.g. https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2F2011%2F10%2F28%2Fsteve-jobs-tributes%2F
So I want users to be able to share this link on facebook but I want only a specific picture to be the thumbnail for this sharing picture and no other images that appear on my web site
I read the documentation about facebook share and I got this
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share
Basically what I understand is that
<link rel="image_src" href="thumbnail_image" / >
should do what I want. However, I cannot get this to work. My site is programmed using rails and, inside the layout, I have the above tag to take in an image url coming from a model instance.
Does anyone know how to use this properly? Am I misunderstanding something about this tag? I want to disable user from selecting through the images that I have on my page and just allow the user to share with only 1 image which I have to specify.
To specify a specific picture you will need to add open graph meta tags to your page. Take a look at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/.
The open graph tag for your case is: og:image